Kristina Miller

If you don´t know who Kristina Miller is, take a few minutes to watch her perform at the piano. She's one of those people who remind you of those Olympic gymnasts who make you sit back and say, "That's got to be photo-shopped; the human body can't actually do things like that."

Kristina Miller has a great sense of humor, which you can see in her choice of fun pieces for the piano.

Here she is playing the Blue Danube Waltz, for example, with full pizzazz. 

And the theme from Die Fledermaus.  

I say "pizzazz" but I think that's an understatement. She's using the elaborated versions (known as "paraphrases") transcribed by György Cziffra, a Hungarian of Roma background, one of the greatest virtuosos of all time, with fingers that seem to be able to move at lightning speed in all directions, and always with total accuracy. Great fun to listen to. [You might want to check him out, as well, on YouTube.]

I've been fascinated with Kristina Miller since I discovered a serendipitous connection. Our paths might have crossed if we had lived in the same historical time. In 1960-61, I was a student at the University of Munich, in Germany. I lived in a dormitory run by the Lutheran Church at Arcisstrasse 31, on the corner of Hessstrasse, just two and a half blocks up the street from the klunky old building at Arcisstrasse 12, built during the Nazi years and known as the Führerbau, the "Führer's building, the place where Hitler and Chamberlain, to his everlasting shame, signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, leading Hitler to believe he was going to be able to get away with murder. When the war ended, Germany converted Arcisstrasse 12 into what is today the Hochschule für Musik und Theater.

And that's where, but for several decades intervening, my path would have crossed with Kristina Miller's. At the age of twenty, the former child prodigy, after winning all kinds of awards for her skill at the piano in her native St. Petersburg and in Moscow, won the prestigious Steinway Prize, which accomplishment led to her being admitted to the Music Hochschule (University, in English). Since then she has emigrated and now lives in Vienna.

She can, of course, like Yuja Wang and Martha Argerich and all the other many concert-level pianists, also bring you to tears with lyrical interpretations of the great composers like Rachmaninoff.

But there are times when I just want to sit and appreciate more with head than with heart, and stare in disbelief and her stunning virtuosity, which not many can imitate. What a gift to the world.

photo: from her Facebook page