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Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien

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Noblesse oblige

Krystian Zimerman

In the beginning ­was the light. A wunderkind is in the world, not pushing its way forward but simply there, breathing happily. The writer describe­s the 5th of December 1956, when God in his goodness had decided to scatter his manna on this wintry day over Zabrze, a small town in Upper Silesia. The little one’s name is, unsurprisingly in Catholic Poland, Krystian, and he carries a secret with him. For those who stand around him and rejoice at his arrival in the world have as little inkling as the wider music world, that would later find more than enough reason to marvel at this artist, just what an immense talent lay there in the crib. Such thing­s take time to develop, no matter how miraculous they may be.

At least 101 percent

Krystian received his first piano lessons from his father while still very young. And he was barely seven years old when he appeared for the first time on Polish television with two of his own compositions, making a self-assured debut. This already gave notice of a tendency of the pianist that remains in evidence today: He never does anything without being more than 101 percent convinced that it is worthwhile. Some call this perfection, but one could simply call it a state of mind or a philosophy, as Zimerman himself has done, albeit in completely dialectical form. When asked once whether his perfectionism knew no bounds, he replied, “For me, when I have the feeling that something is unplayable in the way I wish to have it, this is not a reason for stopping. This is when I really start to look for ways to make it possible after all. For the most part I do find the way, it just takes time. I try something and in the next concert take a step further, and eventually I am so far away from where I started that people accuse me of perfectionism. Yet the idea of perfection always moves further away the further one travels along one’s chosen path.”

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Jürgen Otten

Donnerstag, 29. April 2010
Krystian Zimerman
Konzertprogramm

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