lban Gerhardt began playing the violin when he was 4. „It was an experiment of my father‘s,“ he says, „and it failed miserably.“ Gerhardt also studied the piano. „One day when I was 9,“ he says, „my mother asked me if I would like to play another instrument. ‚How about the cello?‘ she said.“

Now, a 37, Gerhardt is acknowledged as one of the world great cellists. He will play Schumann‘s Cello Concerto with the Spokane Symphony…Gerhardt‘s father was a violinist in the famed Berlin Philharmonic. „Our home was filled with music when I was growing up,“ he says. „There was my mother‘s lovely singing and my father competing with his quartet rehearsals.“ Gerhardt began his studies in Berlin, then came to the United States to study at the Cincinnati Conservatory with Boris Pergamenschikov and members of the LaSalle and Tokyo Quartets. He made his orchestral debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1991. His solo career was already well under way with competition victories that included the ARD Competition in Munich and the Leonard Rose Competition in Maryland.

„It was always my dream to become a member of my father‘s orchestra,“ Gerhardt recalls. „But when the opportunity came with the early retirement of the Philharmonic‘s principal cellist, I didn‘t take the audition, against the advice of my father and his colleagues. „I knew at 23, I was too young to be ‚set up for life.‘ I did not want my natural laziness to keep me from trying to reach my boundaries which, as I grow older, have moved further and further away.“

After living in New York for a while, Gerhardt now lives in Berlin with his wife, Katalina, and their 6-year-old son, Janos Antonio. „Berlin is a huge city,“ the cellist says, „but the center, where we live, is comparatively small. We are only a few minutes from the Philharmonic hall and the Opera, and only seven minutes to the airport.“ More importantly, he says, „We are only two minutes walking from a playground with a lake. „Right now my son studies the piano, but there is no fear that he will turn into a musician as well. He doesn‘t make himself practice, and when I am not practicing myself, I just want to do fun things with him rather than making him pratice.“

Gerhardt‘s repertoire covers the range of cello literature from the baroque to the avant-garde modern, including the standard concertos - Dvorak and Tchaikovsky alongside new ones by Stephen Albert and Henri Dutilleux. Two of his recordings have won ECHO prizes, Germany‘s equivalent of the Grammys: Brahms‘ Sonatas and Anton Rubinstein‘s Cello Concerto No.1. „But the Schumann Concerto encompasses for me more of the human psyche than any of the other romantic concertos,“ Gerhardt says of the piece he‘ll perform Friday. „It is more complex; as music it has that ‚all-or-nothing‘ attitude we know from Goethe‘s Werther,“ he says. „But at the same time it is more songlike than the others; it shows just what a fantastic songwriter Schumann was.“

Travis Rivers, The Spokesman, Spokane, February 10, 2005