Karol Szymanowski: Piano Works

Despite his formidable reputation as one of Poland’s very finest composers, Karol Szymanowski has never quite achieved the popularity of his near-contemporaries Rachmaninoff, Ravel and Stravinsky. Yet he still has distinguished admirers, and now acclaimed piano virtuoso and fellow Pole Krystian Zimerman is celebrating Szymanowski’s 140th birthday year in style with a magnificent new recording focused on his solo piano music. “The very first time I played in London, back in the 1970s,” he tells Apple Music, “I made a point of programming a piece by Szymanowski. And by a strange quirk of fate, in the audience that night was a young Simon Rattle, who, of course, went on to become the finest Szymanowski conductor on the planet!” Zimerman’s starting point for his new album was a recording of the three-movement Mythes he made back in 1981. “I’m so grateful Deutsche Grammophon kept this snapshot of my playing from half a lifetime ago,” Krystian beams. “To be honest, I was never that keen on early digital sound—it tended to be very clean and direct, so that it was very difficult to create a sense of mystery. I can still just about recognise it as my playing, although I would probably interpret it quite differently now.” Moving the clock forward to June 2022, Krystian was looking for a concert hall in which he “would have total freedom to make music on my own piano. My good friend Yasuhisa Toyota not only offered me the magnificent concert hall he designed in Fukuyama, Japan, to use at my leisure, but despite the upsurge in COVID cases and attendant regulations, he got all the necessary permissions for me in just three days. I had the most wonderful time just sitting there alone, working through the night playing Szymanowski. It was beautiful—absolutely wonderful. To be honest, I don’t remember having so much fun making an album. In a way, it is probably my most personal recording, the culmination of five decades’ devoted study. “When putting the album together, I decided