Krystian Zimerman

Krystian Zimerman ( born December 5, 1956 in Zabrze, Poland) is a Polish pianist.

Life

Zimerman studied at the Music Academy in Katowice and won the 1975 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. In addition, he was awarded the special prize of the Chopin Society.

He has since worked together with conductors such as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa and Sir Simon Rattle, and joined acquaintance with the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. The greatest influence on him but had by his own admission the conductor Kirill Kondrashin and Carlo Zecchi as well as the Polish theater director Tadeusz Kantor, who showed him a means of communication with a multilingual ensemble, which Zimerman has been useful for his work with orchestras.

Zimerman withdrew early record releases, because they no longer met its own high standards. The result was that his few recordings available are often among the references on the market, such as his interpretations of Debussy's Préludes, the piano concertos, the Dance of Death and the B minor Sonata of Liszt and the Concertos Nos. 1 and No. 2 by Rachmaninov.

Zimerman is not more than 50 concerts a year, which is not cost-covering by his own admission.

Zimerman occurs at irregular intervals as a conductor in appearance. After the death of Leonard Bernstein, with whom he had taken a complete recording of Beethoven's piano concertos in attack, he completed the recordings of the missing first two concerts and also took over doing the tasks of the conductor.

This " experiment" he repeated in 1999: by the creation of the Polish Festival Orchestra to Chopin's 150th death anniversary. Together with the young, exclusively Polish musicians Zimerman went on tour - only with the two concerts in E minor, Op 11 and F minor, Op 21, which he then grossed on CD.

Krystian Zimerman leads a master class at the Music Academy of Basel.

In April 2009, he caused a scandal during a concert in the United States when he called from the stage in relation to the U.S. missile shield in Poland: Get your hands off my country ( " Let your hands off my land "). These statements may have been personally motivated as Zimerman's Steinway grand piano was, shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11 confiscated eight years earlier at the entry to the U.S. because of suspected terrorists by customs and destroyed.

On June 4, 2013, he broke from a concert at the Philharmonie Essen, because it filmed a listener. After he had entered the stage again, Zimerman told his anger over illegal videos.

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