SSO GALA: KRYSTIAN ZIMERMAN IN CONCERT / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

SSO GALA: 

KRYSTIAN ZIMERMAN 

IN CONCERT

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Wednesday (7 December 2022)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 December 2022 with the title "Zimerman's direct playing gives Beethoven freshness".

 

Legendary Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman is one name guaranteed to sell out the box-office at Singapore’s Esplanade Concert Hall, even for two evenings. An originally planned Beethoven piano concerto cycle in 2020 had to be shelved by the Covid-19 pandemic, but to witness him performing just one Beethoven concerto and conducting a symphony was good enough for most.

 

Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto opens with a G major chord, and the short solo that followed could not be delivered in a more plain-spoken manner. No special effects were needed, and the orchestral tutti was crafted with the same simplicity and directness. Ultimately, the work was treated as chamber music with keyboard soloist as leader, and Zimerman fulfilled that role to a tee.

 

His playing was transparent and articulate, and the orchestra’s partnership had both lightness and mobility. At the movement’s close, Beethoven’s own first movement cadenza was played, and this was as idiomatic as to be expected.

 

Very brusque unison strings came without a break after the closing chord, and Zimerman reacted as if shocked by the seeming rebuke. There was a long pause before the piano’s entry as a soothing salve. Here, the famous description of “Orpheus taming the Furies” about the central movement was taken both literally and theatrically. The strings superbly marshalled by concertmaster Igor Yuzefovich went from a fierce roar to a pacified purr.     

 

The finale was lively and buoyant, a continuation of the earlier lightness, culminating with an audacious downward glissando and upward chromatic scale. Many in the audience would have heard this concerto many times, but Zimerman injected a freshness which made this encounter an enriching one.

 

Encouraged by the applause, Zimerman pondered on his encores with some banter to the appreciative audience and settled with three little gems. Chopin’s Nocturne in F sharp major (Op.15 No.2), Brahms’ Intermezzo in B flat minor (Op.117 No.2) and Szymanowski’s Prelude in B minor (Op.1 No.1, which he recently recorded) were rendered with much colour and beauty.

 

Those expecting a sharp drop of Zimerman’s interpretive abilities as the conductor in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony would be left disappointed. For his was a no-nonsense reading, served up without  any idiosyncracy. This was instead one mustered with clarity and directness. Earlier in January, the orchestra had performed this same symphony with swiftness and litheness under Music Director Hans Graf. This performance had a similar lightness and immediacy, with simply no posturing for its own sake.

 

While the first two movements were taken straight, the rustic Scherzo could possibly have done with Beethoven’s simulation of ungainliness, one which Graf brought out so perfectly. The finale’s rapid tarantella rhythm was launched into fearlessly, with strings in fine form from start to end. With the gala concert brought to a spectacular close, it may be said that the SSO has attained a very satisfying level of playing, sustained with a consistency that is truly admirable.   

A more extended version of the review was first published on BachTrack on 8 December 2022:

Striking Beethoven with Krystian Zimerman leading from the keyboard in Singapore | Bachtrack

Here are the pictures Krystian Zimerman did not want you to see (photographs uncredited):

Krystian Zimerman ponders
what his encores will be.

 

 

Krystian Zimerman 
looks happy with the concert.

SSO Concert: GALA: KRYSTIAN ZIMERMAN / Review

GALA: KRYSTIAN ZIMERMAN

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (5 January 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 January 2013 with the title "Zimerman wows with silky touches and fluid fingerwork".

Krystian Zimerman. Here is a name that can fill the Esplanade to the rafters, even if he is not playing either of Chopin’s piano concertos. On this occasion, his debut with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the choice of Witold Lutoslawski’s Piano Concerto to commemorate the 20^th century Polish composer’s birth centenary was most apt.

Dedicated to and premiered by Zimerman himself in 1988, it deserves to be better known. Lutoslawski’s sound palette is both delicate yet pungent, and the highly transparent piano part wafted like ether through the orchestra’s still opening of harp, woodwind and string whispers. First we hear wisps, fragments and shards from the piano, and the semblance of a theme emerges like a nascent sun’s rays for an early climax in the first movement.

“Rachmaninov without tunes,” wrote one critic, but that view is just simplistic. The work is spread over four movements without a break. A mercurial scherzo and the ruminations in a slow movement’s soliloquy are discernible, so is a final passacaglia, as if in obeisance to classical form. But one needs to forget the theory and bask in Zimerman’s pianism, silky touches, crashing chords and astonishingly fluid fingerwork.

The 24 minutes or so held one in its thrall, and if atonal music could be made to sound so persuasive, even inviting, then a composer’s craft is vindicated. The tumultuous applause yielded two encores, thankfully not Chopin, but instead the coruscating first movement from Grazyna Bacewicz’s Second Sonata and Debussy’s shimmering Pagodes from Estampes.  

The first music to be played by the Singapore Symphony was Dvorak’s American Suite, five highly agreeable short movements cut from the same fabric as his New World Symphony. Native Indian melodies and Negro spirituals dressed up in Central European finery made for easy listening, and one was hard put to tell where Bohemia ended and Louisiana began.

The concert closed with Beethoven’s popular Seventh Symphony, supposedly routine repertoire but the performance was anything but ordinary. Conducted by Music Director Shui Lan with neither score nor baton, he took a decidedly brisk view to the classic. The slow introduction was light-footed but not lightweight, and the ensuing Vivace was exactly that, vivacious and a bit more.

The second movement’s Allegretto, the slowest movement of four, grew in stature and built to a heady climax. The final two movements raced off in breakneck pace, but this was not mindless velocity for its own sake but more an expression of exhilaration, which made the Trio’s hymn tune of the third movement all the more gratifying.

The breathless finale would not have been possible if not for the tower of strength that was guest timpanist Paul Philbert, formerly of the Malaysian Philharmonic, whose steadiness on the sticks at high speeds was an inspiration. It certainly was a Gala Concerto to remember.    



CD Reviews (The Straits Times, November 2011)

MARTHA ARGERICH AND FRIENDS
Live from Lugano 2010
EMI Classics 708362 (3CDs) / ****1/2

The Martha Argerich Project of the annual Lugano Festival brings together the world’s top young musicians in a feast of chamber music, inspired by the sheer presence and personality of the Argentine piano legend herself. Every edition throws up a panoply of works, familiar and obscure. Argerich appears only in the first two discs, but her effect is electric, not least in Chopin’s First Piano Concerto – a signature favourite of hers – with the Orchestra Svizzera Italiana conducted by Jacek Kaspszyk. She also joins some-time partner Stephen Kovacevich in Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos & Percussion in a fiery performance, reliving the good old days of their famed collaboration.

Rarities make this box-set a keeper as well. Where else would one get performances of piano quintets by Enrique Granados, Erich Korngold or Alfred Schnittke? The last is a particularly acerbic work that closes the collection on a pall of depression. But that is offset by sparkling works for multiple pianos by Chopin (Rondo Op.73), Brahms (Schumann Variations Op 23) and the scintillating Gershwin-Grainger (Porgy & Bess Fantasy). The pick of the crop are Liszt’s Les Preludes on two pianos (with Argerich and Daniel Rivera) and the three-piano transcription for three pianos by Carlo Maria Griguoli of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite (Griguoli, Giorgia Tomassi and Alessandro Stella). Enjoy!

GRAZYNA BACEWICZ
Piano Quintets / Piano Sonata No.2
KRYSTIAN ZIMERMAN, Piano et al
Deutsche Grammophon 477 8332 / ****1/2

Only a pianist of Krystian Zimerman’s stature could have persuaded Deutsche Grammophon to devote an entire release to Polish music not composed by Chopin or Szymanowski. Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) was without doubt Poland’s greatest woman composer. More of her music, obscured from the West because of her relatively early death behind the “iron curtain”, is being heard today. Perhaps the least unfamiliar is her Second Piano Sonata (1953), a virtuoso vehicle that possesses a fluent but turbulent lyricism, brilliantly realised by Zimerman. The finale is a coruscating toccata that will make it a concert hall favourite.

The two piano quintets are classically conceived despite the modern idioms employed. Tonality is retained, but with dissonance that goes beyond the pungent chromaticism of Szymanowski. The First Quintet (1952) is perhaps more memorable than the compact and ascetic Second Quintet (1965), largely due to the use of the oberek, a mazurka-like dance that goes back to before Chopin’s time. Bacewicz is a distinctive and original voice, and repeated listening will reveal a similar appeal enjoyed by established icons like Bartok, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Zimerman and his compatriots on strings invest their heart and soul in this musically rewarding outing.

THE ART OF AUTOGRAPHS (Part 2)

Mikhail Pletnev's near-illegible scrawl

Windows to the soul?

So what do artists’ autographs look like? They range from grandiloquent sweeps (Evelyn Glennie, Carlo Curley), beautiful cursives (Barry Tuckwell, Angela Hewitt, Anne Sophie Mutter), illegible claw-like scratches (Ivo Pogorelich, Mikhail Pletnev), to the very basic writing of one’s name (Seow Yit Kin, Marc-André Hamelin, Ronald Stevenson).

Krystian Zimerman (above) signs only with green ink, while Yo-Yo Ma uses two different styles, including one in Chinese characters. The French-American pianist Joel-François Thiollier always includes an aphorism or wisecrack, crafted on the spur of the moment.

A collage of autographs (from L):

Pinchas Zukerman, Marc Neikrug's 

hieroglyphics, David Finckel's reverse check 

and Oscar Shumsky's yin-yang

One of the most unusual specimens comes from the late American violinist Oscar Shumsky, which looks like the yin yang symbol – an S inscribed within the confines of an O (OS for his name, get it?). Other intriguing ones belong to pianist Marc Neikrug - which looks like some ancient script - and cellist David Finckel (of the Emerson Quartet), which comprises merely the Nike check and a dot. “Just done it!” it seems to proclaim.

Do these autographs reflect their owners’ personalities or characters? I am not a graphologist but I would like to think that something in an artist’s psyche comes through in their handwriting besides their music. SSO Music Director Lan Shui’s autograph is slick and stylised, just like his conducting. Russian maestros Mstislav Rostropovich (above), Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Vladimir Ashkenazy (below) all sign their multi-syllabic surnames in full – displaying a certain pride in their heritage.

Local composer Tan Chan Boon’s resembles an alpine peak, mirroring the loftiness of his Bruckner-like symphonies. Arch virtuosos like Arcadi Volodos and Peter Donohoe, who simply refuse to do autographs (a gesture of contempt for the very people who support their careers), probably suffer from some hidden inferiority complexes.