Krystian Zimerman

This award winning set from 1991 will not be to everyone's tastes. The recording and the playing are perfectly suited to each other being exceptionally clear and precise and with wide dynamic range. The playing on this pair of discs is, as mentioned above, exceptionally clear and precise and came as quite shock to me when I bought it some 20 years ago. Everything is laid out for inspection without the slightest hint of softness or textural shading. It is like going into a room with all the main lights on rather than finding the room lit by numerous lamps on tables and other furniture. There are no subtleties of nuance attempted in the normal way allowing for shadows and half-lights metaphorically.

Krystian Zimerman stands as one of the most sensitive and exacting concert pianists to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century. His extensive recordings as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist cover a broad range of repertoire from the classical period to contemporary music.

Krystian Zimerman - the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw at the age of eighteen – giving his Homage to Chopin and Schubert. As a brilliant musician, a renown specialist in Romantic music Krystian Zimerman combines all the prerequisites for an authorative interpretation of Chopin´s works.

Krystian Zimerman's Chopin is big. He plays this music with a great dynamic range and huge contrasts, with little of the shading we love in Rubinstein's Chopin. Except for the Barcarolle, these are pretty big pieces, so Zimerman doesn't exactly overwhelm the music.

It was an eminently sensible decision to couple Zimerman's previously separate Chopin concertos on a single CD. The Ax/Ormandy/RCA disc is the only rival as a coupling, so let me say at once that in different moods I would be equally happy with either.

Les Noces is a screaming, shrieking, flat-out masterpiece. Leonard Bernstein himself has referred to it as Stravinsky's greatest work, and listening to this incendiary performance, it's awfully hard to disagree. Scored for voices, four pianos, and percussion, the work provided the inspiration for the entire career of Orff (of Carmina Burana fame), but it's so much better as sheer music than anything Orff wrote. And what a cast! The pianists for this performance include Martha Argerich, Krystian Zimerman, Cyprien Katsaris, and Homero Francesch, four certified virtuoso performers, while the singers of the English Bach Festival Chorus really cover themselves with glory in both works. A stunner.