Chopin Piano Concertos – Zimerman and Giulini

There is a particular sound Deutsche Grammophon’s engineers caught in Munich, sometime in 1978, that no remastering can quite explain away. Call it the sound of youth being trusted with something ancient and fragile. Zimerman was barely into his twenties, fresh off the Warsaw triumph. Giulini, who by then had nothing left to prove to anybody, simply handed him the room.

That’s the thing about these performances that still gets me, decades on. The deference runs both ways. Giulini shapes the orchestral introductions with the patience of a man who has all the time in the world — those hushed string entries in the F minor sound almost liturgical — and then steps back, lets the young Pole simply sing. He does, phrase after phrase, with a legato so seamless you forget there are hammers involved at all.

I’ve lived with this E minor concerto since it first appeared. I confess I still reach for it more than I probably should, given how many rivals have come and gone. Argerich’s incandescence with Dutoit. Perahia’s poise. Pollini’s steel-edged clarity, which some prefer and I never quite have. But there’s something in the Larghetto — marked con gran espressione almost redundantly, since the whole point of Chopin’s writing there is that expression is built into the bones of it — where the pianist’s rubato feels less like interpretation than like breathing. Nothing is imposed. Everything simply occurs.

The F minor gets, if anything, the finer rendition of the two. Giulini’s tempo in the opening Maestoso has an unhurried grandeur that some conductors rush past, eager to get to the piano’s entrance. Here the orchestra earns its keep, phrase by phrase, before Zimerman even sits down to play. The finale’s mazurka rhythms have real dance in them, not the polite curtsy some pianists offer this music, but something closer to actual Polish soil.

Now the complicating wrinkle, and it’s a substantial one. Zimerman went back to both scores in 1999, this time from the keyboard itself, directing his own hand-picked Polish Festival Orchestra, no baton-wielding elder required. That version runs long — five extra minutes per concerto, enough to blow the two works off a single disc entirely. Rubato stretched to its breaking point. Dynamics pulled to extremes. Orchestral inner voices lit up in ways some of Chopin’s critics have argued for a century and a half don’t actually exist in the scoring. Reactions split violently. I know pianists, serious ones, unsentimental about this repertoire, who consider the 1999 release a kind of luminous indulgence bordering on the perverse.

I won’t rehearse that argument here except to say: it exists, it’s real, and it colors how one hears these earlier performances now showing up freshly minted in the Originals series. Heard side by side with his older self, the young Zimerman of 1978 sounds almost conventional. Poised, yes. Immaculate, certainly; that fingerwork in the F minor’s outer movements has a pearled evenness that hasn’t dated one second. But there’s a caution in it too, a reluctance to bend the architecture that the older Zimerman abandons wholesale.

Which is better? Wrong question, probably. They’re not really in competition, these two accounts by the same artist a generation apart. They’re more like two different people who happen to share fingerprints. The 1978/79 version gives you Chopin as most of us learned to love him: elegant, aristocratic, faintly Parisian even in its Polish accent. The reissue’s transfer, incidentally, is exemplary. DG’s engineers have opened up the string tone without stripping any of the analog warmth, and Giulini’s basses have real weight now where older pressings turned them slightly papery.

Buy this one if you want the performance history books will keep citing. Buy the 1999 remake if you want to hear an artist argue with his own legend and very nearly win. Better still, and I mean this without qualification, buy both, and let them argue with each other on your own shelf.