ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704110025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANTHONY TOMMASINI N.Y. Times News Service
Because Krystian Zimerman is such a meticulous musician, he plays fewer concerts per year than the typical superstar on tour.
Krystian Zimerman, the acclaimed Polish pianist, expects no great financial success from his current North American recital tour. Typically, he has brought along his own piano and a full-time technician, expenses he must cover himself.
And all of this for just three concerts: in Chicago, in Toronto and, on Wednesday evening, at Carnegie Hall.
With a program of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert ready to go, why not extend the tour to more cities? Almost any other pianist would. But Zimerman gives no more than 50 concerts a year, a low number for an artist of his drawing power. All this has pegged him as an impractically exacting musician.
``I am trying to play as many concerts as possible,'' Zimerman said on a recent visit to New York. ``But I cannot do it. No way. I envy people who play 200 concerts a year. Just think of how many dreams I could finance.''
Zimerman's caution certainly does not stem from any lack of skill. At 40, he is considered one of the most remarkable pianists of his generation. Half of his 14 recordings for Deutsche Grammophon have garnered prestigious awards. But he is a probing, meticulous musician, and preparing performances to his satisfaction takes time.
The music world immediately realized it was dealing with someone different when Zimerman won first prize in the 1975 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Then 18, he was the youngest of the 118 contestants and the first Polish winner in 40 years. As part of his prize, he embarked on a series of recital tours and concerto appearances with major orchestras. After a year, he'd had enough.
``This was not what I wanted my life to be about,'' he said, sipping tea in a midtown cafe. Dressed in a wool sport coat and scarf despite the mild weather, the rugged-looking, bearded pianist might have been some intense academic on a library break.
``After the prize and all the concerts,'' he added, ``I had earned some good money and could afford to go places that were fantasies before.'' So he spent two years in London, just absorbing the place, going to small theater productions, studying English, reading history and practicing with no pressing goals.
Naturally, there was whispering in the music business about his inexplicable behavior. But Zimerman was content.
``I have taken other breaks since then,'' he said. ``That first one I advertised, just so people would not think something bad had happened. The others I have not advertised.''
Another aspect of Zimerman's life that he refuses to sacrifice to the celebrity circuit is his family: his wife, Maya, a violinist he has known since student days in Poland, and their two young children. They live in Basel, Switzerland, where he also teaches at the music academy.
``I hate not being home,'' he said, ``sitting in a city for three weeks just to play a concerto four times, which could be done in four hours.''
But mostly, what keeps him from playing more is his wide-ranging mind. Asked why he has chosen to play sonatas by three Classical masters, he delivers a discursive but compelling explanation touching on international politics before the French Revolution; Haydn's sense of humor despite an ``absolute pain'' of a wife; Beethoven's shadowy love life; and Schubert's vision of music's future, which emerged only in the last year of his brief life.
Zimerman has immersed himself in the study of acoustics, and he scrupulously supervises the engineering of his recordings. Interestingly, his knowledge of the science of sound leads him to debunk the practice of cleaning up old recordings with new technology.
``I find the whole thing unfair,'' he said. ``It would be like undressing the Mona Lisa and finding out she didn't take a shower. Those recordings only work in their original state, with hiss and noise. These were the conditions the artists making them accepted.''
In fact, Zimerman likes to listen to new CDs for the first time while driving his car. ``I know this sounds insane for a musician to say, but the hum of the car covers the clinical nonsense of the digital recording,'' he said. ``And because my consciousness is preoccupied with the road, the music goes right into the place where it belongs: the unconscious, where emotions are created.''
For all his meticulousness, Zimerman's concept of musical interpretation is fluid. Last fall, during the first rehearsal for a performance of the Brahms D minor Concerto with the New York Philharmonic, the conductor, Herbert Blomstedt, asked about the tempo for the first movement. The pianist said he didn't care.
``This was a typical answer for Krystian,'' Blomstedt said recently. ``His interpretations always have firm foundations. And the firmer the foundation, the easier it is make improvisations on that scheme. He is an imaginative and sensitive player. The more sensitive one is, the more susceptible one can be to impulses from your colleagues, or to the degree of concentration of the audience, or even to the social currents in the air. That's what happens with Krystian.''
LENGTH: Medium: 94 linesby CNB