Piano music runs deep in the soul of Olga Kern

Classical music, more than visual arts and certainly pop music, is all about tradition. It’s about who knows whom and who carries the torch for a particular composer or style.

Pianist Olga Kern is steeped in the lore and legacy of great Russian music. Her great-grandmother, a singer, performed with Rachmaninoff, as documented in his memoirs, and her great-great-grandmother, a pianist, was a friend of Tchaikovsky.

“Tchaikovsky wrote to her an incredible letter, which we have, and we have absolutely unique photos from Tchaikovsky to her,” Kern said. Her family has donated other documents connected to Tchaikovsky to a museum. “I was always proud of that,” she said. “I thought that something special happened with my family.”

But that link goes beyond ancestry for Kern, who performs a program of Russian music with the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra this weekend.

In 2001 she became the first woman in 30 years to take the gold medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Cliburn, though an American, became almost an adopted son of Russia after he won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958. Kern’s parents were at those performances, and to this day Russian musicians consider the charismatic Texan, who died in 2013, a “hero,” Kern said.

Kern’s fascination with Cliburn was such that she participated in his competition twice — she went by Olga Pushechnikova in 1997, later changing it to make things more palatable for international audiences. She got ousted in the first round that time but, leaving her toddler son behind in Russia, came back in 2001 “because I wanted to meet Van Cliburn,” Kern said.

Though Kern is now 41 and is considered one of the greatest pianists of her generation, she gushes like a schoolgirl when she talks about Cliburn.

“When he hugged me the first time, I felt his (cologne) all over me, and I didn’t want to wash my clothes after that. I didn’t wash my hand after he shook my hand,” said Kern, who has followed in Cliburn’s footsteps by founding her own music education program and piano competition, which launches this fall in New Mexico.

KERN’S ATTACHMENT to piano and piano music runs deep into her soul, and she feels it was ingrained into her before birth. When she was 12, she was able to learn Rachmaninoff’s challenging third piano concerto in two weeks.

“I felt like I knew music already before I was born,” she said. “I asked my mother, ‘How is it possible? I feel like I know this piece already.’ And she said, ‘Maybe it’s because when I was pregnant with you, I was playing this concerto a lot.’

“I always wanted to play this beautiful instrument, this monumental instrument. It has everything: It has strings and has hammers and the pedals and such a beautiful body, and it can make such a beautiful, huge sound and at the same time such a refined, incredible refined soft sound, so there is so much gradation in the sound. I was always amazed, and I always wanted to play piano.”

She is still exploring the instrument, particularly its singing quality, which is accomplished by subtle use of the piano’s sustaining pedal. She’s worked with great opera singers, like Renee Fleming and Kathleen Battle, trying to learn from their phrasing “how to make the line longer, how to make the sound bigger.”

“When the piano sings, there’s nothing better than that,” she said. “It’s really a magical thing.”

She will perform two of the shorter piano concertos in the repertoire here: Tchaikovsky’s rarely performed third piano concerto and Prokofiev’s first. It will be the first time she’s played the two on the same program.

The Prokofiev work has a vibrant, youthful quality, not surprising since he was only 20 when he composed it, purposely digressing from the compositional principles of the day to enter it into a contest, which he won.

“There’s so much happiness in it,” Kern said. “There you don’t need much pedal, because it must be crispy, and it must sometimes be very ironic, like Prokofiev has a very ironic sarcasm. Then there’s a great laugh and happiness. It’s a really wonderful piece.”

The Tchaikovsky, she said, is known for its solo cadenza. “It’s huge and it’s very difficult,” she said. “I think this is one of the points why pianists don’t want to play it. … I think it needs to be played more.”

The Tchaikovsky exhibits a particularly Russian quality in that “you always feel elements of nature,” she said. “It’s not always written in the score … but you feel it.”

She gets that same feeling in parts of the mainland, like the South. She lives in New York now and recently became a U.S. citizen, but lived in Fort Worth, Texas, site of the Cliburn competition, for two years after her competition victory.

“I couldn’t believe how similar the nature was there with Moscow nature,” she said. “It was completely flat but there was so much green.”

She’s especially looking forward to visiting Hawaii. She’s bringing her son along as a present for his recent graduation from Juilliard.

“This is the only state I have not been to,” she said. “Of course, I wanted to come earlier. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long.”

Two other Russian classics, Tchaikovsky’s explosive “1812 Overture” and Rachmaninoff’s final work, “Symphonic Dances,” the composer’s nostalgic look at the dance and church music of Russia, fill out the program. Victor Yampolsky, who led a fulfilling concert of Russian music last season, returns as guest conductor.