SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Nocturne in F sharp major, op. 15/2

Sonata no. 2 in B flat minor, op. 35

Scherzo no. 2 in B flat minor, op. 31

Sonata no. 3 in B minor, op. 58

Barcarolle in F sharp major, op. 60

At 19 years of age, he was the youngest pianist ever to win the International Chopin Competition. That was in 1975. It seems only fitting that, a few days after Chopin’s (presumed) birthday, Krystian Zimerman should officially open the year in which Hamburg, along with the rest of the musical world, celebrates the 200th anniversary of his compatriot’s birth.

Zimerman is a rare guest on concert stages, giving no more than 50 recitals a year. He makes even rarer appearances in recording studios: his last solo recording is from 1990, and he even withdrew some of his earlier recordings.

Is the reason for this really just his much-quoted perfectionism? Surely, with digital recording techniques it is easier than ever to produce a flawless CD – but Zimerman has even expressed his objections to them. So the real reason must be somewhere else.

What are we to make of a pianist who claims that “music is not an auditory experience, that “music is not sound,” and who prefers listening to music in his car – while driving? Curiously, it is precisely the emphasis on the perfection of sound that makes Zimerman so suspicious of digital recordings.

No doubt sound is extremely important to him as well – why else would he have no less than six pianos at home! However, he regards sound not as an end in itself but as the element which music uses to achieve its true purpose, that of “organizing human emotions in time.”

The stories Zimerman tells are invariably thrilling. One the one hand, he gave us the Chopin we know. The demanding program he chose was familiar, consisting of some of the best-known works of piano literature (which includes the one encore he played, Chopin’s C sharp minor waltz). The Chopin we heard was the one who, in Liszt’s words, “(unites) in himself the frequently incompatible qualities of passion and grace.” In Zimerman’s hands, Chopin’s music was also a marriage of the physical and the ethereal, of passion and aloofness – all rendered with absolute clarity, intelligence, and sometimes even humor. On the other hand the works were anything but dusty old showpieces to serve as a medium for demonstrating the pianist’s virtuosity. Even the technical brilliance of Krystian Zimerman seemed only incidental to an experience that was brimming with life in all its paradoxes – including demonic, meditative, and almost carefree moments, all presented cleanly but by no means clinically.

Zimerman’s interpretation of the arguably most famous piece of the program, the Marche funèbre from the B flat minor sonata, perfectly exemplifies this marriage of the familiar and the unfamiliar: Zimerman evoked not merely a funeral procession (as usual); using hardly any rubato almost throughout, the bass turned into the pendulum of a clock, so that it was as if death personified were mercilessly approaching.

Krystian Zimerman tells stories through music, whose main purpose is communication – the very opposite of the situation in a recording studio. What’s more, a studio result pretends to be more perfect than communication that is alive (and hence depends on individual audiences) can possibly be. In fact, there is never just one perfect rendition of a piece of music, although that is the illusion of a recording. Moreover, communication of such utmost concentration and intensity is impossible to deliver evening after evening. And so it is no wonder Zimerman makes himself so rare. The reason has less to do with “perfectionism” but with integrity. (As it was his integrity that made him stop giving concerts in George W. Bush’s America.)

At the end, the house came down. We’ll rebuild it for him.

Thomas K Thornton