Marek Żebrowski: My German adventure

Touring Germany throughout the late 1980s and the early 1990s gave me a chance to try out different piano repertoire I’ve acquired over the years of my studies in Poland, France and America. At some point I decided to return to Ravel’s Miroirs, a set of five piano pieces I played for my Bachelors of Music recital at the New England Conservatory some fifteen years earlier. Since German public (and local press) received my performances of Miroirs warmly, I decided to record this rarely performed set and pair it with selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suite. Once this decision was made, Joachim quickly managed to find the Festeburgkirche near Frankfurt, an excellent modern venue with wonderful acoustics and a great Steinway concert grand. He made the necessary arrangements and also found a superb and experienced recording engineer, Wilfried Zahn. The sound on this CD issued by Apollo Records in Germany in 1992 was so outstanding that the Analogue Audio Association soon asked for a license to publish it in a high-quality vinyl LP version that came out in Germany only a year later.

My next recording project – also supervised by Joachim Kramer and recorded by Wilfried Zahn – turned out to be quite an adventure. This time Joachim found a fine late 19th century church in Leipzig (Paul-Gerhardt-Kirche), with a barrel-vault ceiling and great acoustics but without a piano! After many inquiries and very complicated negotiations, a superb Steinway concert grand was eventually rented for my recording project from the fabled Kreuzchor in Dresden. It was August 1994 and just a few years after Leipzig and Dresden – along with the rest of the former East Germany – were finally reunited with the rest of the country. Driving east with Joachim from Sindersfeld was both exhilarating and challenging. Once we crossed the former East German border, the roads quickly became decrepit, the signage was spotty and misleading, and infrastructure everywhere showed a lot of longtime neglect. Staying in a nice guesthouse just outside of Leipzig we were spared the random noise of many building sites all around downtown, where many seemingly abandoned houses were being either torn down or undergoing complete renovation. One could see the city with proud musical traditions slowly regaining its former glory, and realize how much still had to be done. In any case, this CD recorded in Leipzig’s Paul-Gerhardt-Kirche with Wilfried Zahn once again at the master controls, featured Robert Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13 and Waldszenen, Op. 82. This time, however, owing to various complications and a change of management at the Apollo Records label, my recording languished unpublished for exactly 30 years until Polish Chamber Musicians’ Association (Stowarzyszenie Polskich Muzyków Kameralnych) and its energetic and resourceful director, Grzegorz Mania, decided to revive this project in 2024 and issue it on their own label.

Whilst my concert tours of Germany effectively ended in the mid-1990s owing to my moving to Los Angeles and assuming different professional responsibilities, my close connections to Germany not only remained, but also moved to another level and a completely different subject area that had nothing to do with music!