Warsaw concerto Zimerman tows his own BY BECCA DEWAN

Don’t be alarmed if you don’t recognize the piano on stage at Merrill. Like many great artists, Krystian Zimerman is not without his eccentricities. For the last 11 of his 26 years of concertizing, he has traveled with his own piano in tow. He’s earned the right. After studying at the Katowice Conservatory, Zimerman became the youngest-ever winner of the International Chopin Competition, a win which opened the doors to concert halls worldwide. Music’s in his blood. Zimerman’s father, a factory worker in Warsaw, had a passion for making music. Almost daily, musicians congregated in his house to play chamber music — a ritual in which Zimerman participated at a very early age. (What a rich way to socialize — a cultural sophistication that Americans seem to lack.)

So much for classical music being dominated by Germans. On Sunday, the Polish Zimerman will fill Merrill Auditorium with the sounds of music by composers from Poland and France, performing the music of Chopin, Ravel, and Godowsky.

Recognized for his Chopin interpretation, Zimerman will open the concert with Four Mazurkas from his Op. 24. Frederic, a Pole himself though he spent much of his life in Paris, is known for incorporating folk idioms of Poland into his pieces, even though nationalism didn’t take off in the musical world until the twentieth-century.

A mazurka is a Polish dance from the Mazovia region, where Chopin spent his childhood. The dance is characterized by a shift of the accented beat in a triple meter. Usually one thinks, while dancing a waltz, "ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three." The mazurka rhythm would change this to "one-TWO-three" or "one-two-THREE," emphasizing the moves of the dancers. The mazurka dance was in vogue in Parisian high society long before Chopin arrived, but Chopin’s mazurkas were not intended to accompany dancers. Surely, the Merrill wouldn’t mind if you got up in the aisles to accompany the Chopin, however.

Chopin explored church-modes (not your typical Do-Re-Mi scale) in a number of his mazurkas — listen for this especially in No. 2 of Op. 24. This unorthodox harmony and rhythm led critics of his time to call his music quirky and exotic. Exactly, I say. That’s why the pieces are so dazzling.

The second piece on Zimerman’s program is Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor, Op. 35. Those listeners who are used to being able to follow traditional sonata form will have a much more difficult time with this composition. In his second piano sonata, Chopin uses the institutionalized form as a mere guideline by which he showcases features of his other piano genres — nocturnes, mazurkas, and preludes, to name a few. The recapitulation of the first movement is anything but ordinary. Interestingly, the third movement was written as a funeral march at least two years prior to the rest of the composition.

The reception of Chopin’s compositions was quite varied and often dictated by the nationality of the critic. The French focused on the nuances of his emotional expression while the English characterized his music as "drawing-room trifles" and "tuneful gems."

Maurice Ravel, an influential French composer spanning the turn of the twentieth-century, was more universally adored. He was a lyrical composer who explored pitch, harmony, and tonality within the confines of musical Impressionism, a movement, distinctly French, which lead to the exploration of atonality. From childhood, Ravel was fascinated with the music of exotic places, incorporating those sounds, consciously or not, into his compositions.

Valses Nobles et Sentimentales is the third piece on Zimerman’s program. It was originally composed as a solo piano piece, and then later orchestrated by Ravel for a ballet troupe and performed under the name Adélaide ou Le langage des fleurs. Although Ravel was most often against tampering with his own works, he found orchestrating this piano piece to be informative, casting a new light on an old gem.

While Ravel’s piece challenges the concept of diatonicism, it is a mere stepping stone toward pure atonality utilized by other composers. However, there are instances, like in the seventh waltz of Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, that each hand is playing in a different key.

Ravel had a wandering eye when it came to music of other cultures. Both he and Leopold Godowsky had an affinity for gamelan music from Java in Indonesia. The last selection on Zimerman’s program is five pieces from Godowsky’s Java Suite.

Godowsky was born in Poland and moved to America in his mid-teens, by which time he was already an accomplished pianist. He made a name for himself as a composer with his studies on Chopin’s Etudes. His rigorous concert schedule had him traveling all around the globe. After a visit to Java, Godowsky composed the Java Suite, Tonal Journeys for the Pianoforte, a collection of 12 pieces capturing the essence of places and events he encountered.

A culturally rich aural extravaganza is coming to town. Put down your gamelan, rest your Mazurka-dancing feet, and make your way to Merrill. Sunday’s globe-trotting concert will surely be a delight.

Becca DeWan can be reached at beccadewan@mac.com.

Krystian Zimerman performs, at Merrill Auditorium, in Portland, April 25. Call (207) 842-0800.