Tuesday 22 November 2022, 8 PM Thailand Cultural Centre, Main Hall
Under the patronage of Her Royal Highness Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana Rajakanya, the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra Foundation – in collaboration with B. Grimm and the Tourist Authority of Thailand – is extremely proud to announce the second visit to the kingdom by a truly legendary musician, the Polish concert pianist Krystian Zimerman. Hailed as one of the very finest concert pianists active today, he will perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major with the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra in the Main Hall of the Thailand Cultural Centre on 22nd November at 7:30 pm. In 2016 Zimerman sold out the TCC for his Thailand debut, and this highly anticipated return certainly promises to be one of the top highlights of the 2022 music season.
The conductor for this concert will be the Canadian-Maltese maestro Charles Olivieri-Munroe, very well-known and respected by Bangkok audiences for many years now. The concert will begin with a particularly exciting contemporary piece, Orchestral Variations on Themes of Chopin by Slovenian composer Anže Rozman. This will introduce Zimerman’s entrance most aptly, since his rise to fame began in 1975 when, aged eighteen, he won First Prize at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. This paved the way for first appearances with the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic in 1976 and the New York Philharmonic in 1979, leading to a truly stellar career.
In 1999, Zimerman created the exceptional hand-picked Polish Festival Orchestra to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Frédéric Chopin’s death. The brilliance and perfectionism of his musicianship later inspired his country’s greatest living composer, Witold Lutosławski, to write his Piano Concerto for him – a modern masterpiece which Zimerman has recorded two times to the highest critical acclaim.
In the second half of this concert, maestro Charles Olivieri-Munroe will guide the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra through another great ‘fourth’ in the orchestral canon – Brahms’ turbulent Symphony No. 4 in E minor, one of the greatest essays in symphonic perfection.
