Born into a musical family, Krystian Zimerman received his first lessons at the age of five from his father. Two years later he began to study with Andrzej Jasinski, continuing at the Katowice Conservatory. Jasinski had been a piano competition prizewinner at Barcelona in 1960 and was only twenty-five years old when he began teaching the young Zimerman. The two became close; Zimerman would spend his holidays with Jasinski and his family and had no other piano teacher. Zimerman gave his first recital at the age of six and has always enjoyed playing in public. At the age of eighteen he won first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, the youngest of 118 competitors. Jury member Arthur Rubinstein invited him to Paris where the young pianist studied and observed his famous elder compatriot. Although he received many offers to perform after his win in Warsaw, Zimerman decided to accept only a small number of these. In fact, from the beginning of his career he has limited his public appearances to around fifty per year, and is his own agent. Zimerman prefers to live a modest life and have the image of a serious musician rather than that of a superstar virtuoso.

In 1980 Zimerman took fourteen months away from the concert stage and travelled to London where he took time to improve his English (he speaks four languages) and expand his repertoire. It was an unusual step to take for a twenty-five-year-old pianist already at the height of his profession, yet it was a wise decision because it enabled Zimerman to be in control of his career, rather than permit his career to control him.

He has since performed with great acclaim throughout the world, even at the beginning of his career working with conductors such as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Kyrill Kondrashin. More recently Zimerman has been teaching at the Music Academy in Basle.

Not surprisingly, Zimerman’s repertoire is based around Chopin, but he took care not to become a Chopin specialist. He also plays Liszt, Brahms, Beethoven, Schumann, Grieg and Debussy, and champions Polish composers including Karol Szymanowski and Witold Lutosławski. He has also played Schubert and Mozart, but if he thinks a work, or a composer, does not suit him, he will drop it from his repertoire. Immensely self-critical, he records every public performance he gives and will then scrutinise the recording, taking note of anything that does not please him. Zimerman manages to retain a freshness and spontaneity in his playing. His sound is always cultivated and refined, somewhat aristocratic. As a young man he was likened to Dinu Lipatti, especially in his recording of Chopin’s waltzes, and it is true that Zimerman has a similar polish and crafted finish to his work. Through controlling his own career and recording schedule, Zimerman has emerged as one of the great pianists of his generation, always striving after perfection and aiming to broaden his musical experiences and repertoire.

Recordings from the International Chopin Piano Competition show Zimerman’s wonderful talent and ease before an audience. Some of these recordings were issued by the Polish label Muza, as was an LP of Beethoven’s ‘Pathetique’ Sonata Op. 13, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 3 Op. 28 and Bacewicz’s Piano Sonata No. 2 from a live performance in 1977.

From 1980 Zimerman has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, and although he prefers an audience, he understands the need for making recordings. He likes to be in control of the finished product and is very particular over sound, acoustics, editing and everything to do with the recording process. He has produced some extremely fine recordings, the most notable in the concerto repertoire being both the concertos by Liszt and a hair-raising performance of the same composer’s Totentanz, all with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa. His recordings of both Chopin concertos with Carlo Maria Giulini and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra were made in the late 1970s, a few years after his win in Warsaw, whilst a live recording of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor with Kyrill Kondrashin and the Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1986 was issued by Deutsche Grammophon. Recordings with Leonard Bernstein include both Brahms’s piano concertos, the Concerto No. 2 being critically praised, and the last three of Beethoven.

Of the solo recordings, an early disc of Chopin’s complete waltzes, described at its time of release as ‘…arguably the finest version to have appeared since Lipatti’s’ seems never to have appeared on compact disc, whilst a disc of the four ballades, Barcarolle Op. 60 and Fantaisie Op. 49 displays playing of great refinement. In fact, Zimerman is now unsatisfied with some of his earlier recordings and has not permitted their reissue on compact disc, most notably a disc of four Mozart piano sonatas. In the early 1980s Zimerman recorded all three of Brahms’s piano sonatas, the Ballades Op. 10 and the Scherzo Op. 4. Only one of his discs, a recording of Schubert impromptus, has received slightly adverse criticism.

Zimerman’s attention to detail led him to prepare for performance and recording both of Chopin’s piano concertos in 1999, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death. With the Polish Festival Orchestra, he honed and refined an interpretation that put the music under a microscope. The smallest detail was revealed, often to the detriment of the musical flow. As a critic in the American Record Guide wrote, ‘The opening several minutes of the E minor are a host to an egregious assortment of “expressive” mannerisms, including doublings and halvings of tempo between phrases.’ More successfully, Zimerman applies the same fastidiousness to both piano concertos by Ravel; Pierre Boulez is the conductor, and the performance is a model of clarity, yet somehow it is altogether rather cool. The same fault appears in his recording of the complete preludes by Debussy, even though it won The Gramophone magazine’s Record of the Year Award in 1994. The recording, made in 1991, finds Zimerman striving for optimum clarity, again putting the music under the microscope. A critic in The Gramophone referred to it as ‘sharply etched, “modernized”’, stating that ‘…the sensibility may not be orthodox Debussyan’; yet at the same time praised it for these features. Far better is Zimerman’s solo disc of Liszt, containing excellent performance of the Piano Sonata in B minor coupled with Funerailles and some of the late pieces.

Of chamber music Zimerman has recorded Szymanowski with violinist Kaja Danczowska, and Richard Strauss and Respighi with Kyung-Wha Chung. Zimerman plays some contemporary music and has recorded some solo works of Webern for a boxed set of the composer’s complete works issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 2000, and the Piano Concerto by Lutosławski, which was written for him. In June 2004 Zimerman was due to play in London a generous selection from the Java Suite by Leopold Godowsky, but the performance was cancelled due to the pianist’s illness.

Zimerman’s most recent release has him back at the top in recordings of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 2. These are performances full of bravura, with a combination of perfect technique and musicality that is rarely heard today.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).