He plays the piano for cancer research

It would be dearer to him, if it were in this article more to the thing than to him myself, said the 47-year-old from Zurich, Kispi-oncologist and Pianist Nicolas Gerber at the Meeting. So, the facts first: Each year around 220 children in Switzerland to a cancer diagnosis. The are in comparison to the 37'000 adults are so few and individual cases are so different that the research according to economic criteria, it's hardly worth"". Accordingly, it is difficult money to raise.

So why not have a charity concert schedule? The man has not asked only in the children's hospital, and the grandiose violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja had this idea. And here is Nicolas Gerber is now just into the game: as a special case of a physician who was in his earlier career Kopatchinskajas Duo partner – and your Whatsapp-proposal with Yes answered.

"It's not easy to have two equal passions."Nicolas Gerber

music and medicine have accompanied Gerber has always been. He was five when he had to leave in the Kispi a sixth Finger slimming; afterwards, the parents sent him in the piano lesson, "so to speak, for therapeutic purposes". The music grabbed him then, so much so that he abandoned it later in the high school, to study in Lucerne with Hubert Harry, piano. But at some point, the "head work was missing him", so he took the University entrance exam, began the study of medicine, and then returned again to the music.

A 15-year-old Slalom it was, he says, a difficult time: "It is not easy to have two equal passions." In 2001, as he sat down again on the piano, he met Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who at the time was to start on Through. Brahms, you would have played at the first Meeting, "and they played with such force and freedom that I just thought: Wow, what have I done so far?"

a Ravel-spectacle

But she, too, was excited; soon the two were together, both in Switzerland and abroad. To Gerber, but then again the medicine, The work moved on, this time for good: "as a children's oncologist is just right for me." As a cancer specialist, he had close relationships with his patients, often over a number of years. And then the research is there: "In the past few decades, the chance of Survival of children with cancer has increased from 0 to 80 percent," says Gerber; now, it is not necessary to increase this ratio still further, but also to reduce the sometimes massive side effects and late effects.

Gerber to talk to the fire, when he speaks of – and also, when he tells the story of the concert programme. Kopatchinskaja and he chose, with the exception of Ravel's "Tzigane" louder works that he has listed never: the Sonata No. 14 by Mozart, with the he way, since the study of "strange" is hardly more; Schumann 2 has dealt with it. Sonata, "a red-hot piece of that I wanted to play has always been"; and then something Contemporary of Toru Takemitsu, "a very serene, floating music, just Right in front of the Ravel-spectacle".

Currently, he is Practicing, he took four weeks vacation for it. Half the things are not for one such as him.

concert with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Nicolas Gerber: Monday, 25. November, 19 Uhr, Tonhalle in Zurich, Zurich, .

Created: 20.11.2019, 15:00