Pianist Olga Kern to play with NMPhil

Russian American pianist Olga Kern boasts familial connections with both Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

The Albuquerque favorite (a regular here, she usually sells out) will perform a concerto by the latter with the New Mexico Philharmonic on Saturday, Oct. 12, at Popejoy Hall.

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in d minor is often described as the Mount Everest of concertos.

Composed in the summer of 1909, Rachmaninoff premiered the piece on in New York City with himself as the soloist.

Kern performed the piece when she won the gold medal at the Van Cliburn competition in 2001.

“It’s like a symphony; it’s not just a concerto,” Kern said in a telephone interview from her New York home. “It’s one of the hardest. It’s very emotional, very physical. It’s a long composition — 45 minutes long.

“I’m playing a big cadenza in the first movement,” Kern explained. “For us pianists, it’s a very exciting piece to play every time. Every time, I can find something new in it.”

Kern’s great-grandmother was a mezzo-soprano.

“She knew Rachmaninoff and Rachmaninoff was accompanying her on piano,” she said. “There are letters and notes in Rachmaninoff’s memoirs of dates when they performed together. For me, it feels like genius touched my family.”

Kern’s great-great-grandmother was a pianist who played with Tchaikovsky.

“She knew him,” Kern said. “She was his friend. Her gave her photographs with his signature. It’s in the Tchaikovsky Museum” outside of Moscow.

Kern began studying piano at age 5 at the Central Music School of Moscow, and gave her first concert at age 7. She won her first international competition, the Concertino Praga Competition, at age 11 in what was then Czechoslovakia. At age 17, she won first prize at the first Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition. While in school, she received an honorary scholarship from the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin in 1996.

Kern became an American citizen in 2016 and teaches at the Manhattan School of Music.

The New Mexico Philharmonic will follow the Rachmaninoff concerto with Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major, one of the composer’s most popular works. It was written in 1874 and revised several times through 1888.

Bruckner composed 11 symphonies.

The symphony’s nickname of “Romantic” was used by the composer himself. This was at the height of the Romantic movement in the arts as depicted, amongst others, in the operas of Richard Wagner.

According to Nazi Albert Speer, the symphony was performed before the fall of Berlin, in a 1945 concert. Speer chose the symphony as a signal that the Nazis were about to lose the war.