Gramophone Awards 2025
Winner - Chamber
Presto Recording of the Week
4th April 2025
Krystian Zimerman (piano), Maria Nowak (violin), Katarzyna Budnik (viola), Yuya Okamoto (cello)
Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60
Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 2 in A major, Op. 26
Pianist Krystian Zimerman’s latest album reflects a love of chamber music that dates back to his childhood. With colleagues Maria Nowak (violin), Katarzyna Budnik (viola) and Yuya Okamoto (cello) he has chosen to record two of Brahms’s three piano quartets: No. 2 in A major and No. 3 in C minor. Zimerman convinced his friends that they should not focus on No. 1 in G minor, the best- known of the three, for precisely that reason, challenging them to “play No. 2 and No. 3 and make them the most famous!”
It was Zimerman’s father, a keen amateur pianist, who instilled a love of chamber music in his young son. He would invite friends to the family home in southern Poland to play everything from Strauss waltzes to transcriptions of Mahler symphonies. Krystian began by listening and page-turning, but was soon joining in on the piano. “It was a fantastic experience to feel this passion for making music together and to be part of it,” he recalls. The instant fame resulting from his victory at the 1975 Chopin Competition briefly took him away from chamber music, but he found a way to incorporate it into his life again, and over the last five decades has collaborated with violinists Kyung-Wha Chung, Kaja Danczowska and Gidon Kremer, among many others.
"Zimerman is disarmingly honest about the foursome having come together ‘more or less by coincidence’ - and yet to listen to the group’s playing you could be forgiven for thinking that this was some long-running musical dynasty like the Borodin String Quartet or Beaux Arts Trio. The delicate question of how concertante the piano part should be in chamber music is deftly handled, with Zimerman shifting between limelight, background and indeed at times an intriguing middle-ground." - Presto Music, 4th April 2025
