Review: Krystian Zimerman's controversial appearance at Disney Hall

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Los Angeles Times - By Mark Swed - April 27, 2009

in 1978, an unknown, soft-spoken, 21-year-old Polish pianist appeared as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for its newly appointed music director, Carlo Maria Giulini, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The performances of Chopin?s two piano concertos were recorded by Deutsche Grammophon. Krystian Zimerman?s eloquence went far beyond his years, and a major career was launched.

Zimerman In the '80s, Zimerman became Leonard Bernstein?s favorite pianist, the conductor?s choice to record the Beethoven and Brahms piano concertos. In 1992, the summer before Esa-Pekka Salonen became music director of the L.A. Philharmonic, he selected Zimerman to perform with the orchestra at the Salzburg Festival.

And now, Sunday, making his Disney Hall debut in a recital sponsored by the Philharmonic, Zimerman, who has become arguably the greatest pianist of his generation, made the surprise and shocking announcement from the stage that in protest to America's military policies overseas and particularly in Poland, he would no longer perform in the United States.

?Get your hands off my country,? he said, soft-spoken but seething. He accused the U.S. military of wanting ?to control the whole world,? and made a reference to the U.S. military detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Approximately three dozen in the audience walked out, some shouting obscenities. ?Yes,? he answered, ?some people when they hear the word military start marching.?

Others remained but booed or yelled for him to shut up and play the piano. But many more cheered. He responded by saying that America has far finer things to export than the military, and he thanked those who support democracy.

Zimerman (who doesn't allow photos taken of his performances) had been in a seemingly curious mood all evening. Normally, the most exacting of pianists, he dispatched with strange impatience Bach?s Partita No. 2 and Beethoven?s Piano Sonata No. 32, Opus 111, in the first half the program. He quickly walked to the piano and instead of allowing the audience to quiet and the mood to be just right, he launched into each piece, not even waiting for latecomers to be seated before beginning Beethoven?s most visionary sonata.

A program change from Brahms? late piano pieces, Opus 119, to the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Grazyna Bacewicz, announced over the loudspeakers after intermission, was the evening?s next surprise. It was premiered in 1953 and is a strikingly modernist, moody and nationalist sonata for Soviet Poland. Again Zimerman went straight to the piano and immediately attacked the percussive first movement. The performance was riveting.

Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski?s "Variations on a Polish Folk Theme," Zimerman more typically sat meditatively on his bench for a moment. Twice he leaned toward the keys and almost began to play, but then turned to the audience saying he hadn?t planned to speak but decided he could not keep silent.

Zimerman is a magnificent obsessive. He travels with his own Steinway, is his own piano technician, and even his own truck driver. He typically spends half a year devising a concert program and will do anything to achieve the sound he desires. Three years ago at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, he substituted Gershwin for Chopin because the Transportation Security Administration had held up his piano at the airport and he didn?t have time to practice to adjust it properly. An earlier piano was destroyed by Homeland Security at JFK airport because officials were suspicious that its glue could be an explosive in disguise.

All along, Szymanowski?s Variations had seemed an unusually lightweight end to a program that contained far-reaching Bach, Beethoven and (originally) Brahms. An early work by the only internationally famous Polish composer of the early 20th century, the pleasingly Chopinesque Variations were written in 1904 when the composer was 22 and demonstrate none of the erotic mysticism of his mid-career compositions or the folk-inspired nationalism that made him known as the Polish Bart?k.

Yet to hear Zimerman play anything in Disney was amazing. His Bach was richly nuanced and beautiful although pushed in the final Capriccio. The trills in his Beethoven had a bell-like shimmer that sounded like a newly discovered acoustic phenomenon.

But in the Szymanowski, Zimerman?s meticulous tone, so luminous in the Introduction and theme, ultimately took second place to idealistic patriotic zeal. It?s a good thing that he can look after his own pianos, because this one will probably want some doctoring after the treatment he gave it. There was no encore. Pianist, audience and piano were all spent. The cheers were deafening.

I hope Zimerman reconsiders his U.S. embargo. He has, of course, angered some Americans. But our country is precisely the place where politics are not outlawed from the concert hall. And I can?t imagine a more compelling case to be made for Polish solidarity than his incomparable performance of these variations.

Fake Faith and Epic Crimes | The War Criminals Among Us | Commentary
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Cyrano's Showcase - By John Pilger - April 2, 2009

?The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.? ?Milan Kundera

THESE ARE EXTRAORDINARY TIMES. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committed to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as ?the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.? International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, ?if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves.?

In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity.

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had ?universal jurisdiction? statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against ?ourselves,? or ?our? allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. Home Secretary Jack Straw let him escape back to Chile.

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. ?Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,? he said. ?So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ?former President George Bush? [but] as a current war criminal.? For this reason, Bush?s former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, ?We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.?

The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama?s national security adviser, James Jones, said, ?I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.?

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair?s wars. Spain?s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq ? ?one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law? that had left the UN ?in tatters.? He said, ?There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay.?

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the West. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa ? the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

Today, the unreported ?good news? is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde R.L. Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: ?Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter ? I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete.?

Blair, too, is safe ? but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing ?an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges,? according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair?s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E.W. Thomas wrote: ?My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr. Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr. Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate.?

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East Envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli ?peace prize? worth a million dollars. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long revealed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister ? a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his ?project? and crimes is an embarrassment and preferably forgotten.

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer?s former leading Blair fan, declared that ?this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried.? He demanded, ?Did Blair never ask what was going on?? This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: ?Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?? In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Iraq?s ?contribution to international terrorism? and Saddam Hussein?s ?frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction.? Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a ?point of principle? for Blair who, he later wrote, was ?fated to be right.? He lamented, ?Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.? In the subsequent six years at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour ? in Australia, the original murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the ?mystical? Blair in the Guardian of than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous groveling to the Nazis: ?I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to sooth them.?

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as ?a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion.? She asked him: ?What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability ?[sic]?? A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about ?values.? Doogue said to him that ?it was the bifurcation about right and wrong that what I thought the British found really hard? [sic], to which Blair replied that ?in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was.? It was his classic lie, which passed unchallenged.

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his ?James Bondish-ish Gulfstream? where she was privy to his ?bionic energy levels.? She wrote, ?I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?? Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. ?That is war, I?m afraid,? said Blair, ?and war is horrible.? No counter came that Gaza was not a war but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair?s task to ?prepare them for statehood.? The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man ?has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated.? The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that ?women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him.?

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a ?prayer breakfast? with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. ?We pray,? said Blair, ?that in acting we do God?s work and follow God?s will.? To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair?s ?faith? represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part ? or, like Alistair Campbell, his ?communications director,? offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some ? might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: ?Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas.?

These are indeed extraordinary times.

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s. He has been a foreign correspondent and a front-line war reporter, beginning with the Vietnam war in 1967. He is an impassioned critic of foreign military and economic adventures by Western governments. ?It is too easy,? he says, ?for Western journalists to see humanity in terms of its usefulness to ?our? interests and to follow government agendas that ordain good and bad tyrants, worthy and unworthy victims and present ?our? policies as always benign when the opposite is usually true. It?s the journalist?s job, first of all, to look in the mirror of his own society."

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