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Chopin: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 | 
 enlarge | Creators: Frederic Chopin, Krystian Zimerman, Polish Festival Orchestra
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Category: Music
List Price: $17.98
Buy New: $9.30
You Save: $8.68 (48%)
New (40) Used (13) from $8.00
Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 15375
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 459684
UPC: 028945968421
EAN: 0028945968421
ASIN: B00002DE0S
Release Date: November 2, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Tracks:
Disc 1
| • | Allegro maestoso | | • | Romance | | • | Rondo |
Disc 2
| • | Maestoso | | • | Larghetto | | • | Allegro vivace |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Chopin's two piano concertos have long been admired more as pianistic vehicles than as integrated works for piano and orchestra. But in his revelatory new recording, Krystian Zimerman suggests otherwise: The opening orchestral tuttis have so much more light, shade, orchestral color, and detail, you wonder if they've been rewritten. Every gesture, every instrumental solo is so specifically characterized that by the time the piano makes a dramatic entrance, the pieces have become operas without words. One may wonder if Chopin intended that. In fact, he knew bel canto opera in his native Poland, but the more positive proof is that the music has so much more to say when treated this way. Some will find the performances disturbing: The interpretations are so much more about content than form, and there's so much tempo and rhythmic flexibility, that the music sometimes seems unmoored and adrift. But upon repeated listening, the sense of fantasy is so beguiling that you wonder if you could ever go back to more conventional performances. --David Patrick Stearns
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| Customer Reviews:
 Best recording of the concertos out there! April 30, 2007
Aneta Rusek (New York)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I searched the web and stores in general for many years trying to find something better... better does not exist in this case.
A tender and delicate Chopin April 7, 2007
Vera Kolb Gregory (Kenosha, WI)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Mr. Zimerman and his Polish Festival Orchestra have produced a very fine recording of the Chopin Piano Concertos No. 1 and 2. Mr. Zimerman has hand picked young Polish musicians to form this orchestra. While it is quite possible for the musicians who are not Polish to completely succeed in interpreting Chopin, I think that it does help if one absorbs Chopin with the mother's milk, so to speak. Mr. Zimerman plays piano and also conducts. He lets the orchestra flourish. They produce a big wave of intricate music. One can hear that the musicians in the orchestra are pouring their hearts and creativity out. One can feel the freedom of the orchestral expression. The orchestra follows the gentleness and the lyricism of Mr. Zimerman's interpretation.
Mr. Zimerman will immediately touch your heart. He is a great master of Chopin.
Mr. Zimerman plays beautifully, with delicate soft dynamics. He achieves the full emotional effect without any over-expressions. He goes softer and more delicate in many places in which others may add more sound and strength. His effect wins.
My favorites are the Rondo from the Concerto No.1, in which Mr. Zimerman plays energetically and with determination, but without any harshness of tone, and the Maestoso from the Concerto No. 2. In the latter the orchestra initially goes for less sound, rather than for the bigger sound often heard in other orchestras. There is a vein of Chopin's sadness that would be lost if the orchestra were too bright. The piano enters dramatically, but then becomes whimsical, and later quite sad. More moods follow. This is the most beautiful movement. After the great introduction and the middle part the momentum is lost. It is regained towards the end of the movement, but one could feel the recovery. I guess there is a trade-off when one uses the tempo changes as a way to express subtle points in music. The loss of the musical momentum could be possibly looked at positively, as a stopping point for the reflection, but I did not like it. Here is where the stick of an external conductor would be welcome.
All in all, this is a great recording, characterized by finesse, tenderness, lyricism, and gentleness, and a nice capture of the dramatic moments. It is Chopin at its best.
 Very good but certainly not Chopin June 5, 2006
H. Ruiz (Lansing, MI USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a very very good Piano Concerto interpretation and execution. However Krystian Zimerman, despite being as polish as Chopin, does not rise to the ocassion at all times during the Chopin Piano Concertos, and I have to say, the playing is excellent, the interpretation is supreme, but this is not Chopin by a long shot.
Take the first movements of both concertos, staring with #1. An Allegro Maestoso is supposed to be played like an Allegro Maestoso not like a scherzo or a molto maestoso. He does this flip from a blue feeling to a rhapsody playing (and viceversa) that sounds more like Listz or Brahms than a 19 year old passionate prodigious. The second concerto's frist movement again is filled with waves that sometimes make you feel you're listening to a Largetto and again a rhapsody, which this is not. Just listen to Ashkenazy play Chopin solo works and you will likely understand the man himself. Magaloff is also a reference for Chopin's playing.
A better version ? Although I'm not fond of Arrau playing Chopin, I own and prefer his version of both concertos, mostly because of the solist. If you haven't listened to them, I recommend you to do so, as his playing comes in more fluid, natural and consistant with the sheet -and with Chopin's personality-. The orchestation of Zimerman is excellent, and have to admit superior than Arrau's + London which feels somewhat missplaced at times, but as I said the piano execution is not Chopin.
All in all a very good piano concerto for someone who hasn't listened to other interpretations, so don't be surprised if you find superior versions.
Brilliant. Marvellous. Astonishing. February 7, 2006
Gustaw Jokiel (Olsztyn, Warmia, Poland)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
These are undoubtedly the best Chopin's concerti ever recorded. Even if I knew no other performance, after hearing this recording I'd know it's perfect. Until I first heard it, I hadn't ever thought a Polish orchestra could be so excellent. One of the reviewers, Ms Zbikowska (przy okazji, pozdrawiam) wrote she bought these CDs because of patriotic duty :) I'm also Polish, but since I consider most of music pieces to be rather beyond nationality, our Ferdek Ch. will never be my favourite composer because of his nationality :)
Instead, I bought this CD because of Zimerman, who in my opinion is the best today's pianist. I am not disappointed, moreover, I have been rewarded more than I counted for. It's difficult to describe (how can we describe music not to lose something from its beauty and depth)...
Just listen to the slow theme in the 1st movement of the E minor concerto, no matter performed by the orchestra alone or Zimerman with the orchestra. God, when I heard it, this was the first time I ever thought of Chopin's concertos: 'This isn't a sweet, candy-style music, this is real, pure beauty!' Zimerman really feels this music, understands it, thus knows how to play it. And these young talented people from the orchestra... I want them to become our National Philharmonic players! I know Zimerman "trained" them long, but the effect is absolutely unimaginable! In the samples you can hear, how they start each of the concertos. (To be honest, my favourite parts of Chopin's concerti have always been the orchestral exposition of the 1st movements with the first few minutes with the piano) Listen to it. E.g. the unusual beginning of the F minor: quiet, passionate... Then a mighty 'tutti' moment, and then it's moving, accelerating... THIS is the way it should be played! Other example: listen to the very 11-12th second of the beginning of the E minor. This might seem to be a detail at first, not worth mentioning... but how dead and boring seem immediately all other recordings! Here is the passion...
Someone contemporary to Chopin said he was more Polish than any of Frenchmen was French or any of Germans - German... I don't know whether the opinion that the music of a composer is played best by his compatriots is true in all cases, but IMO it is in the case of Chopin - and these recordings confirm it.
Don't care about people who complain about the lack of "spontaineity". There is no room for spontaineity where everything is perfect as is Chopin's head!
Buy these recordings. You cannot be disappointed.
Thanks and sorry for my, perhaps wrong, English spelling or other errors :)
P.S. Deutsche Grammo should pay me for advertisement. :)
A profound, masterful interpretation December 6, 2005
S. Peliska (Naples, FL)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
These concertos were written by a young man in love. In 1830, at the age of 19, Chopin was smitten with the young Polish soprano Konstancja Gladkowska, and he credits her as the inspiration for his two Concertos for Piano and Orchestra, composed during that year. He wrote to a friend: "This is a young, pretty person, who plays, because, perhaps unfortunately, I have my ideal that I have been faithfully serving for six months already without speaking to her, of whom I dream, in honor of whom is the adagio to my concerto..." The youthful, melancholic passion of his first, yet unrequited love is certainly reflected in the concertos, especially in the slow movements, which Chopin described in the following words: "It is rather romantic, peaceful, melancholic. It should give the impression of a loving glance at a place which brings a thousand dear memories to mind. It is a kind of reverie on a beautiful vernal night, by moonlight."
One of the most remarkable things about Chopin is that as a composer he grew to his full potential very early in life. By the time he composed these concertos at the age of just 19, he had already developed his own completely unique pianistic idiom, quite unlike any composer before or since: like Athena springing forth fully formed from the head of Zeus. The mazurka in the finale of the Second Concerto; the romantic nocturne-like slow movements; the graceful, delicate, aristocratic embellishments: it's all pure, unadulterated Chopin. He never composed a single piece of music that did not feature the piano, and he was the author of only a small handful of works for piano and orchestra. Preferring to work in the smaller forms, Chopin is not so much remembered today for his orchestrations, which are sometimes even re-composed by those who find fault with them. But one must remember that the piano concertos were written as a labor of love, and that even if the orchestrations are not perfect, they should be treated delicately and with the same love that Chopin himself put into them.
This is the sensitive new approach that Krystian Zimerman and the Polish Festival Orchestra adopt in their landmark interpretation of the Chopin Piano Concertos. Zimerman hand-picked each and every member of his orchestra from among the finest young musicians in Poland, with the specific purpose of holding a world tour of the concertos on the 150th anniversary of Chopin's death. This recording is the result of that tour, and is nothing short of a visionary musical masterpiece. As both conductor and soloist, Zimerman blends the orchestral sound perfectly with his own performance, capturing every nuance with adroit delicacy, perfectly dovetailing every phrase. I never doubted Zimerman's virtuosity before, but this recording fixes him firmly in my mind as one of the greatest pianists of our time. His attitude towards the music is truly one of love and humility before the composer, rather than "How fast can I play this?" or "How can I use this piece to show off?" His attention to detail is amazing: listening to his performance one gets the sense that he has come to a complete understanding of Chopin's music, capturing the idiom of the composer perfectly, and leaving the listener feeling a profound sense of "rightness." The music on these discs leaves a very lasting impression, and I encourage anyone interested to listen to these recordings and experience the definitive interpretation of Chopin's Piano Concertos.
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