It’s 5pm on 4 October 2023, the day of the Gramophone Awards, and Krystian Zimerman, on a rare visit to London for the occasion, is giving nothing away. ‘Gramophone Award? I don’t know anything!’ There’s a hint of a smile behind the silver beard. I know he’s won. He knows he’s won. He knows I know he knows he’s won. But the announcement is not for another few hours, and until then everything is under embargo. Nevertheless, given the universe of sonic imagination that this legendary Polish pianist seems to have channelled into his recording of Szymanowski on DG, the prize could scarcely be better deserved.

‘I’m very happy that the music of Szymanowski is appreciated’, he says simply, ‘and that it’s so good that it can win awards. Because eventually the music is winning the award. The performer is just trying to perform it. But it’s the success of the composer in the first place.’

Krystian Zimerman at the Gramophone Awards on London, 4 October 2023 | Photo: Colin Miller

The story of this recording, given the timespan and the twists and turns involved, is not so much an article as a 19th-century novel. It all began 30 years ago, when Zimerman (who is now 67) recorded Masques in Copenhagen. The result languished unreleased. ‘The problem at this time was the length of the records and the state of the music business,’ he recounts. ‘You couldn’t play a whole evening of Szymanowski because people wouldn’t come, or the managers thought people wouldn’t come. You had to make interesting programmes and eventually you ended up playing just one piece of Szymanowski. And I would like to play the pieces before recording them, so I proposed to DG: why don’t we make recordings and not records? I will record this, and in the future maybe I’ll come back to the same composer and then we have a CD. It’s not the composer’s fault that a CD has 72 minutes!’

The saga unfolded from there, with many dozens of takes for Masques, but circumstances seemed to conspire against the project. A plan to record five CDs of Polish repertoire ran aground for complex reasons in 2012; then, with upheavals and takeovers at the record company, ‘the recording was already more than 20 years old, and they must have thought, “OK, that guy will never finish it …”.’

Eventually 2022 was approaching: ‘It was the anniversary of Szymanowski, and it was now or never. Playing Szymanowski’s pieces in the Fukuyama concert hall, I felt so at home with this music. Such a fantastic acoustic and a concert hall which has this Porsche effect: you make a crescendo and suddenly you take off, and the piano just flies away. I thought: OK, that’s the place to record it. I talked to [the acoustician] Yasuhisa Toyota and he said that the hall was occupied, but if I didn’t mind recording at night, I could stay there for the next two weeks. I stayed for five more days, spending every night on stage and just playing. I had my recording equipment with me, so it’s completely my own production, with my own settings for the mics. I gave the tapes to DG and they spliced it together.’

'Neither of the main London concert halls is on the level of even European standard, not to say the world standard. And that, for the biggest city in Europe, is a shame'

To form the programme around Masques, he selected compositions to represent the various different creative periods of Szymanowski’s life. The Mazurkas are a special passion for him. ‘In the third period, his Mazurkas were based on different folklore from Chopin’s: that of Podhale.’ Zakopane, where the composer was living at the time, is in the middle of the Podhale region. ‘Combined with modern sounds and harmonies, that is quite a successful experiment from Szymanowski – and very courageous, because after Chopin, nobody dared to write mazurkas. Chopin’s are works of such genius that if you compose mazurkas, you’re dead! Yet Szymanowski managed to write 20 of them, which are absolutely fabulous.’

The Masques, he says, were created very much as part of the 1915-16 zeitgeist. ‘The fashion of writing triptychs was quite popular at this time: there are the three pieces from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, and Szymanowski also wrote the three Mythes, which I recorded in 1980 [with the violinist Kaja Danczowska], the Métopes, which Piotr Anderszewski has recorded, and more.’

Zimerman continues: ‘I owe today much more to the British than to Poland for supporting Szymanowski, right from the beginning. From the 1970s on, this country, the BBC and all the critics supported his music, which was wonderful. Jasper Parrott was the first manager who had the courage to book it in my concerts. I’m grateful to him for that.’ (The pair parted company, with some noise, a couple of years ago.)

Zimerman says he hopes it might be possible to create a complete Szymanowski edition of recordings involving various different pianists. Wouldn’t he record some more of this music himself? ‘I’m so behind in my schedule’, he says, ‘and when I look into the future, my life is slowly approaching this big white light in the background, so I have to hurry.’ He laughs, but notes that we are fast approaching the 50th anniversary of the day when he agreed to record Chopin’s Sonatas Nos 2 and 3.

'I owe today much more to the British than to Poland for supporting Szymanowski' | Photo: Bartek Barczyk

No sign of those yet, although he has been giving peerless performances of them in recitals ever since he scooped the top prize at the International Chopin Competition in 1975, at the age of 18. But after his complete Debussy Préludes in 1993 (another Gramophone Award winner) he released no solo recordings for some 24 years.

There were some stunning concertos: Ravel with Pierre Boulez, Rachmaninov with Seiji Ozawa and, for the 1999 Chopin anniversary, a lavishly attentive and detailed account of the composer’s two concertos in which Zimerman directed the Polish Festival Orchestra (his own creation) from the piano. With the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle, a frequent and beloved collaborator, he went on to record Brahms’s First Concerto, Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety and his second recording of Lutosławski’s Piano Concerto, which was written for him. But it was in January 2016 that he finally returned to the microphones solo, with the two final Schubert sonatas – not least because he had found the perfect venue, the Performing Arts Center in Kashiwazaki in Japan, which was built in the aftermath of the 2007 earthquake that reduced the original building to rubble.

If Zimerman has been a rare presence in the studio, he is now rarer still on concert stages in the UK. His appearances here over the past 10 to 15 years have involved more than their fair share of drama. A high-profile London recital for another Chopin anniversary in 2010 caused him high stress when he spotted someone in the stalls using a recording device. Then, marking the 2018 Leonard Bernstein centenary in The Age of Anxiety with Rattle and the LSO, he was plagued by a violent cough throughout the performance; his playing remained magnificent notwithstanding, but hours later he ended up in hospital in France. And in December 2020, he recorded Beethoven’s piano concertos with the LSO and Rattle amid unpredictable Covid lockdowns, which first entailed him self-isolating for a fortnight in the orchestra’s warehouse and eventually scuppered a Barbican mega-concert of all five works.
Since then, the full effects of Brexit have struck – and this, ultimately, is what is keeping him away, mainly because he travels with his piano (and often brings alternative keyboard actions that can be slotted into it according to repertoire – for the Beethoven concertos he brought at least four). The costs and the sheer hassle of transporting the instrument to and from non-EU Britain have skyrocketed.

‘Now I need an ATA carnet to go out of Switzerland into the EU, another to get out of the EU into the UK, and then more to go back in the other direction. This is perfectly ridiculous,’ he says ruefully. He and his wife, Maya, have lived in Switzerland ever since they were on tour there when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981. ‘And to my great disappointment – and I’m really disappointed here and sorry for saying critical words about this country – dropping the building of the new concert hall in London while having Toyota as its acoustician was one of the biggest mistakes. Knowing how strong classical audiences are here, we owe a good concert hall to these people. I’m sorry, but neither of the main London concert halls is on the level of even European standard, not to say the world standard. And that, for the biggest city in Europe, is a shame.’

There’s a lesson for us all in Zimerman’s alma mater in Katowice, Poland. He played an important role in the creation of its acclaimed new concert hall, the NOSPR, which opened in 2014 with state-of-the-art acoustics by Toyota. It is the home of the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, which has recently appointed Marin Alsop as its new music director and continues to raise the city’s profile internationally to whole new levels.

Zimerman at the piano | Photo: Mark Allan

Zimerman studied at Katowice’s Music Academy, which today bears Karol Szymanowski’s name. Here his teacher was Andrzej Jasin´ski, with whom he had studied since childhood (he later enjoyed some memorable consultations with Arthur Rubinstein). He grew up in nearby Zabrze and credits his passion for music to his father, who worked as a production manager in a factory, but was a keen pianist in his spare time.

‘He would invite friends to play chamber music together at home: sometimes light things like Lehár and Strauss, other times transcriptions of great symphonies like Mahler. In the beginning, I was just watching and turning the pages. Later I was pushing a note here or there, or managing to play a melody. Three years later, I could read any key and mimic this on my own little instrument. It was a fantastic experience to feel this passion for making music together and to be part of it.’

That gave Zimerman his enduring love of chamber music. Following on from his violin-and-piano recordings with Kaja Danczowska and Kyung-Wha Chung, and the recording from 2011 of the Piano Quintets Nos 1 and 2 by Grażyna Bacewicz, his next is the Second and Third Piano Quartets of Brahms, with three Polish colleagues with whom he has been touring in 2023. The release date is mooted for later in 2024.

As we chat on 4 October, we have no idea that three days later Hamas will attack Israel and that country will begin its bombardment of Gaza. The subject of our conversation turns instead to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has impacted heavily upon neighbouring Poland. ‘We spend more and more money on weapons’, Zimerman muses, ‘and I’m afraid that the problem we’re having today with this war [in Ukraine] can’t be solved with weapons. We will only kill more people with them. Solving the problem can be done only with negotiations, discussions and trying to understand the anxieties of both sides. Increasing the defence budget is a disaster for culture, for education and for the medical sector, because that’s where the money will come from; it has to come from somewhere.

‘I wish we could spend at least the same amount of money on educating good politicians and good diplomats to prevent a situation like this, because the situation scheduled itself from 2007. I already protested in 2009, because I saw that Poland was on the brink of a war.’ During a recital in Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles, Zimerman made a speech objecting to the prospect of American missiles being stationed in Poland. ‘Obama in the end decided not to do that, and it probably saved Poland from this war which we have now in Ukraine.’ Since that incident, however, Zimerman has not returned to the US. He says that he had never intended not to play there again in perpetuity, but was misquoted in a newspaper which gave that impression.

Zimerman has dreams aplenty for the future, and those include trying to encourage the inclusion of more classical music on television, something he considers vital for salvaging the art form’s popularity. ‘Look what happened,’ he says. ‘We removed music from the media. Today, none of the great television stations is putting on a minute of music, except NHK and maybe the BBC occasionally. The German stations are not putting on a minute of classical music. The country which created the greatest amount of composers and culture in the last two centuries is betraying its own culture! And they said, “OK, you can do it at Arte”. But Arte is my existing audience, people who already come to my concerts. I want to play for the two major stations, to reach people who don’t yet know that they love this kind of music.’

We must wrap up: the awards evening is about to begin. Zimerman’s Szymanowski has indeed won (his seventh Gramophone Award). A star-studded assembly cheers him to the chandeliers. And his acceptance speech is the only time I’ve ever heard an artist include, in the thank yous, his cat. Zimerman is, as ever, full of surprises. Hopefully he and his piano will be tempted back to these shores soon.