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Krystian Zimerman
One of a kind
BY RICHARD BUELL
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One of Chopin’s pupils recalled the composer’s description of the unisons (bars 54-62) in the B-flat Mazurka Opus 24 No. 4 as "the women’s voices in the choir." "They were never played delicately enough," the pupil goes on, "never simply enough. One was barely allowed to breathe over the keyboard, let alone touch it." Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, in his Bank of America Celebrity Series recital Saturday night at Jordan Hall, communicated more than just an idea of just what Chopin intended. How? By a bit of sly stage direction, it seemed — the dangerous sort that plays with your mind. The three mazurkas preceding had gone steadily and steadily, the piano sonority more concentrated than expansive or prismatic. Then it was as if a grayish scrim had lifted. All took on a heightened color, depth, sharpness of outline. We were in a different world. In retrospect, something similar seems to have been going on in the Mozart (Sonata in C major, K.330) that opened the program. First off, an Allegro moderato that plunked down on the fast, even relentless side of things. The slow movement told another story, proceeding from a cautious, pastel-like, bass-shy A-section to a lifting of the scrim again together with a flooding in of emotion, then back again to an A-section that was hardly the wan creature we had encountered just a few minutes before. It’s an uncommon — and cherishable — pianist who can mobilize timbre, touch, and weight of tone to structural purposes the way Zimerman does. He opens up vistas. But he can also close them. The Allegretto last movement, as flippant as the first, provided closure — and that was about all. Zimerman, who’s a youthful 48, inhabits a more spacious world than might be guessed from the recorded repertory (Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, Liszt, Debussy, Rachmaninov) the world knows him for. He is also a skilled organist who knows the fortepiano inside and out and has considered making a CD — playing the clavichord — of sonatas by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. This was a concert of great, serious things, large and small, all of which added up — exactly. (There were no encores.) But it’s safe to say that a year hence, Zimerman’s way with Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales and Chopin’s "Funeral March" Sonata will not be what we heard on Saturday night, beautifully conceived and one-of-a-kind as these were. What choice have we but to stay tuned?
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