Renowned pianist Krystian Zimerman gave a quite unsual performance on Sunday, April 26 in LA at Walt Disney Hall.
I got the news about this particular event through my daily digest on Artsjournal.com (highly recommended! Never miss this amazing information source about music and arts www.artsjournal.com).

Zimerman apparently criticized some US policies overseas and took the opportunity of his performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall to announce this as his last American appearance. Understandable that he got annoyed also because of the troubles he often encountered due to traveling with his own Steinway piano.

But why taking political reasons regarding the country where I have been invited to perform, and use them to affect my performance and let the audience know, that I would never perform again in that country? First a pianist is performing for the people and not for politics, even though people involved into politics also attend classical concerts.

Just by taking notice of his concert program and the related article on the LA Times, another thing immediately attracted my attention:
Zimerman perfomed Bach´s C minor Partita No.2 BWV 826 as the opening piece. As reported on the LAT, he apparently made a comment before starting to play Bach, saying that it is important to consider the political purpose of a piece of music. If he referred this to a Bach Partita, he probably used the wrong piece for the right purpose.
If we talk about the “political purpose” of a piece of music, I think it is more appropriate to mention for example Beethoven, canceling his dedication to Napoleon for his third symphony “Eroica”, or Shostakovich, whose symphonies are a direct connection with the history of his country at his time.

But Bach Partitas? Political purposes? I don´t really see any.
Partitas have the title “Clavierübung” or “Clavichord Practice”, to be understood not as a simple practice for piano students, rather as a “musical” practice, a composition for the keyboard instrument. Bach mainly required a particular cultivated expression and touch when playing the Partitas, especially referring to the polyphonic manner of performance.

Let us assume for one moment, Bach used political purposes for those works, but this great composer wrote some kind of universal music that even “political disturbing contents” of his time did not affect or even influence the beauty, the clearness and timelessness of his works.

At the end, music has always the power to arise from other contents of life….

Read more about this on Los Angeles Times Arts.