Piano

Krystian Zimerman

Debut at Luzerner Sinfonieorchester: MAR 30th 2010

A Polish pianist who soared high

For Krystian Zimerman, music is the art of organizing emotions in time. Whether he is playing works by Beethoven or Chopin, Schubert or Szymanowski, the Polish pianist’s interpretations display countless expressive nuances and reveal the clarity of his musical narrative.

Zimerman’s first recording for Deutsche Grammophon, a Chopin recital, was released in 1977. His discography as an exclusive artist of the yellow label includes many milestones in recording history, including the piano concertos by Beethoven and Brahms with the Vienna Philharmonic and Bernstein; the concertos by Grieg and Schumann with the Berlin Philharmonic and Karajan; Debussy’s Préludes; and the two Chopin concertos with the Polish Festival Orchestra, a hand-picked ensemble of young Polish musicians that Zimerman founded in 1999 to mark the 150th anniversary of Chopin’s death.

Krystian Zimerman has made two recordings of Witold Lutosławski’s Piano Concerto, which was written for him and is dedicated to him. Zimerman’s first solo album in more than 25 years, a recording of Schubert’s late piano sonatas D 959 and D 960, was released by Deutsche Grammophon in September 2017.

In December 2020, the pianist once again worked with Rattle under difficult circumstances to record all of the composer’s piano concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra to mark Beethoven’s 250th birthday.

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The Beethoven concertos were the focus of Zimerman’s 2020/21 season. He opened the 240th season of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig in September with performances of the Concerto No. 3 under Andris Nelsons and then played the entire cycle with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg and Gustavo Gimeno, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo and Kazuki Yamada and the Concertgebouworkest, again under Gimeno.Krystian Zimerman was born in 1956 in Zabrze in southern Poland to a musical family. At the age of five, he received his first piano lessons from his father, who was a pianist himself, and later studied privately and at the Katowice Conservatory with Andrzej Jasiński. His breakthrough came in 1975 when he won first prize at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw.Since then, Krystian Zimerman has performed with many top international musicians. He has played chamber music with Gidon Kremer, Kyung-Wha Chung and Yehudi Menuhin, among others, and has worked with conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, Herbert von Karajan, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, André Previn, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Stanisław Skrowaczewski.

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