Krystian Zimerman (piano)
Tuesday 29 April 2003
Benaroya Hall,
Seattle
Brahms: Six Klavierstücke, Op. 118
Beethoven: Sonata
No. 31 in A-flat major, Op.
110
Chopin:
Impromptu in F-sharp major, Op.
36
Sonata in B minor, Op. 58
Here's just one measure of the effect Krystian Zimerman's eagerly anticipated
Seattle debut had on the city's music lovers: the performance thoroughly swept
away the bitter disappointment with the news that Maurizio Pollini had cancelled his own
too-long-delayed debut (along with his entire North American tour). By the end
of the Polish-born pianist's recital in Benaroya Hall, an almost giddy awareness
of shared privilege had taken hold of the audience.
After winning, while still a teenager, the 1975 International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Zimerman refused to adhere to the expected pattern of becoming a traveling matinee idol pianist. That self-restraint gave his artistry space to blossom and mature. Now in his late 40s, Zimerman brings to his recitals not only technical mastery but fine-tuned insight; he continually illuminates even repertoire as familiar as this program of Brahms, Beethoven and Chopin.
A Zimerman concert involves a somewhat complicated production: like András Schiff, he travels with a particular instrument (here, a Hamburg Steinway on loan) as well as his own private set of mechanisms, which he custom fits and calibrates to each venue and program. The combination of this literally hands-on know-how with Zimerman's extraordinary technique and poise produced a sound endowed with both richness and clarity. Such a pleasurable balance would have been memorable in itself, but for Zimerman, it served simply as the starting point and sine qua non for compelling musical investigation.
The six pieces from Brahms' Op. 118 often evoke a fragile late-afternoon melancholy, but Zimerman found in them an unusual breadth of sensibility. The A major Intermezzo in particular showed more gentle reserve than resignation; the "autumnal" character of late Brahms was felt not as nostalgia for things past but in the more generous spirit of the harvest season. In the stormy currents of the G minor Ballade and in the F minor Intermezzo, there was an echo of Schumannesque mood swings, but their intensity was kept under control. The trills in the F major Romanze made a miraculous impact, as if the ripeness called forth from the past were still within grasp. In Zimerman's hands this music — even at its most tragic, as in the simple, ineluctable upward spiral ending the last Intermezzo — offered a different sense of late Brahms: it replaced the image of an elderly and even embittered composer, a neurotic in waiting who presages the battles to come in the 20th century, with a healthier Brahms, an old master taking stock.
This wasn't so much a revision of fixed ideas as a clarification, perhaps an expansion. There was a similar process at work in Zimerman's account of Beethoven's penultimate piano sonata. The pianist's astonishing precision of touch and attack was especially well suited to the first movement's treble probings; the magical clarity of his playing balanced beauty of sound with sustained thought. Also notable was Zimerman's lack of exaggeration in, for example, the syncopation and dynamic shifts of the Scherzo. His approach (not unlike that of Pollini) might be described as analytical — it is carefully thought through, but not cerebral. Thus the first appearance and then return of the fugue in the last movement felt musically and emotionally compelling, not merely an experiment in stretching sonata form. The result suggested a blissful state, one both credible and realistic — and somehow sturdier than the straining toward transcendence typically sought in performances of late Beethoven. As with his Brahms, Zimerman did not strike the note of intense inwardness and searching mystery heard from a Radu Lupu; instead, the payoff was a comprehensive sense of the generosity in this music, an ability to encompass its sensual and spiritual qualities at once.
Despite his national origin and early catapult to fame, Zimerman has avoided being pigeonholed as a "Chopin specialist." But the authority he brought to the all-Chopin second half was nothing short of revelatory. After a joyfully clear-headed yet seductive version of the F-sharp major Impromptu, he became a stunning advocate for Chopin's larger-scale ambitions in the B minor Sonata. Zimerman isn't one of those pianists who gives the sense of "improvising on the spot" — his art is richer than that, and his playing feels too well-conceived and replete with subtleties to be strictly of the moment. Yet it is also fascinating in its flexibility, and these two qualities, the thoughtfulness and the expressive freedom, worked together wonderfully to convey a sense of the Chopin Sonata's overarching structure and purpose. The first movement's lingering second theme was startling in its long-limbed, aching beauty, but it never felt merely sentimental; an especially brisk pace imparted inevitability to the finale's dizzying momentum.
Before his single encore, Zimerman inaudibly mumbled a name; the piece had
many in the audience guessing Rachmaninoff or Scriabin. It turned out to be
Polish composer Karol Szymanowski's First Prelude, its power chords another
excellent showcase for Zimerman's lucid but full-blooded
pianism.
