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Rating: ZIMERMAN, ZIMERMAN, MY LOVE
IT WAS 1975, he was winning the "Chopin" and I was literally just born; his career touched my life, a kind of comet with a very bright tail that entered and reflected in the flow of my years of study. He was passionate and expressed through the piano the strong emotions that my adolescence could not define, could not contain. Original without being provocative, able to change face, style, even personality within the same piece, refined in taste and in the ability to vary the tone. The twenty-year-old ZIMERMAN represented the "new" with his great desire to play, to give. And he was beautiful.
He is still beautiful and fascinating, to be honest, but over time his pianism has changed and for some time now he has been defined as the "pianist of perfection" ...I would say of almost perfect control. Measure, balance, control, care, extreme refinement, taste: a perfect orator, that is, someone capable of persuading with the bare but coherent presentation of facts, someone able to CON-QUER and win.
The truth? Authenticity? They are not important.
This is not a criticism of mine, and perhaps not even a real review of the concert I listened to last night at the Parco della Musica: the notes of Bach's 2nd Partita in C minor passed through to intertwine in a line of rigorous, severe continuity with those of the masterful op111 by Beethoven, not a coincidence, C minor; the polystylism of juxtaposing Bach's dances different in tradition and character, coexisting in a perfect circle with Beethoven's non-sonata Sonata, that polymorphous and changing piece with a fugue-like and severe theme, preeminent over everything, denies and shatters the Sonata as a Form.
The fugue and the evident, perceptible polyphony of Bach alongside the subtle, rediscovered hidden but perceptible one of Beethoven.
Pianists, interpreters, live in programs too, and programs reflect them like mirrors; and so it should be.
Rigorous execution, clear, bright, lively then meditative at the right point, but lacks the thrill of sound that touches the skin, the shared emotion, the desire to build with the audience and through the audience, lacks the emotion of contact.
I miss it. Everything is calibrated. Zimerman "grants" something, but does not reveal himself, much less gives.
And I think I much prefer the pianist from some years ago, impetuous, tumultuous, and communicative, touching, sometimes even flawed, and prefer him to this refined pianism where absolutely everything is thought out, nothing is left to chance, even the moment when to make the enraptured audience experience that bit of due emotion;
...I listen and think this is also an approach to music,
cerebral? intellectualistic? whatever the origin, this interpretation should also be accepted, if only because it ultimately manages to be convincing... yet, there is something in me as a musician and as a person that rebels and stirs.
I want my Zimerman back.
I need to feel involved in the listening, to vibrate, to quiver, and not to listen to something with the attention of someone reading a treatise on logic.
Skill, character, elocution "interest" me, but they do not move me.
Only in Chopin's op 58 does he really manage to convey something to me other than admiration and interest, to whirl me away in the incessant progression of the finale that concludes the sonata.
Was it MY Zimerman, the one from my memories and teenage dreams, or rather, once again, was everything foreseen, studied, and programmed?
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