AN ALBUM FROM SERBIA
Kemal Gekić, piano
The concert program presents a fascinating insight into musical creation in Serbia over the past hundred years, great creativity and a wealth of musical ideas. For me, it is a very interesting and inspiring project, which has occupied me for many months. Choosing the program was a challenge, because the repertoire is truly exceptionally rich.
Kemal Gekić on the program Album from Serbia
KEMAL GEKIĆ is one of the most prominent pianists of his generation. He is original, often provocative and intriguing, courageous and very convincing. What makes him so special is his artistic credo, which involves knowing all the essential facts necessary for the reconstruction of the original ideas in the works he plays and the power to bring them to life in front of the audience, providing, according to many opinions, “fascinating, uncompromising and always new interpretations”.
He studied at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, in the class of Professor Jokut Mihailović. At the age of twenty, he was already engaged as an assistant, and three years later he completed his postgraduate studies. His participation in the Chopin Competition in 1985 caused controversy and divided opinions. This will follow this unconventional, extremely expressive and technically perfect artist throughout his entire career, which he has been successfully building for decades in front of a large number of fans in Europe and around the world.
Gekić is one of the rare artists who always interprets the most demanding works of piano literature in a different way. His concerts are broadcast by all major television stations, and his recordings of music by Handel, Mozart, Chopin, Scriabin and Liszt have won awards in Europe, America and Japan. The CD released for Naxos, with Liszt’s transcriptions of Rossini’s compositions, won the Rosetta and the Penguin Music Guide Award, while the recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes for JVC is considered the best in the history of piano playing.
The journey from his native Split, via Zagreb and Novi Sad, brought him to the United States, where he has lived since 1999. In addition to his piano career, he is also active as a tenured professor at Miami International University in Florida and as a professor at the Musashino Academy of Music in Tokyo. He holds numerous master classes around the world.
In parallel with his performing career, he has also dedicated himself to special projects – the promotion of contemporary composers and thematic concerts. In 2016, he premiered the Piano Concerto entitled Guernica in Prague, which he commissioned from the American composer Fredrick Kaufman. The work, inspired by a famous painting by Pablo Picasso, a kind of protest against the madness of war, was later performed in America and Europe, and the recording was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2017. In recent years, Gekić has been organizing full-evening recitals of his original music in Japan, America and Europe. In 2024, the American Franz Liszt Association, of which he is a lifetime member, dedicated part of its annual festival to his works. As part of series of concerts featuring his own compositions, during 2024 and 2025, he performed the melodrama Death of a Smail-Aga Čengić, which he realized in collaboration with Rambo Amadeus as narrator.