Three Great Pianists Part I - Maurizio Pollini
artikel
• David Hackett
Although he was in his eighties and had been in poor health for some time, news of the recent death of Maurizio Pollini still came as a real shock. He had carried on playing and talking about music almost to the end, a man who remained true to his youthful visions, while his flawless technique was hardly touched by the ravages of age.
His passing was a reminder that even the most enduring performers must some day take leave of the stage they have graced for so long. The same has been true of two other pianistic Titans from Pollini’s generation – Radu Lupu, whom we sadly lost in 2022, and Alfred Brendel, happily still with us, though now 93 years old and long retired from playing.
I first came across these three great pianists at a formative stage in my life, with each becoming a major influence on my understanding and appreciation of the classical piano repertoire. Pollini, Lupu and Brendel certainly had a few things in common: all three were essentially modest, cerebral men, with no time for flashy histrionics, all approaching their art with the deepest integrity and humility. But their differences were also interesting and instructional. Each appeared to represent a different pianistic summit: Pollini the most technically brilliant of the three, Lupu the most natural and organic, Brendel the most quirky and intellectual.
But as Pollini’s passing still looms large in the mind, I wanted to devote this first article (of three) towards him. He and I go back a long way. One of the pieces that got into me into classical music was an old recording he made of the Brahms Second Piano Concerto with conductor Claudio Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic. The performance was so effortless, the interpretation so astute, that for many years (the sleeve notes being vague on the subject) I assumed it was a carefully micro-managed studio recording. Only much later did I discover it had been a private performance recorded (and filmed) in a single take. Live performances should never be as good as that, and yet this one was. Pollini’s playing was magical.
It was only in listening to other recordings by Pollini, whether it was Beethoven, Chopin or Schumann, the Second Viennese School or the avant-gardists of his youth (Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono), that I came to recognize his greatest attribute as a performer. He was, above all else, a supreme musical architect, a man who considered the overall shape of a musical composition as thoroughly as its detail. He was almost unsurpassed in his ability to move effortlessly between the most disparate strands contained within a piece of music, all the while making each of them sound like the most logical and natural development.
Perhaps it was an element of absolutism to his playing that allowed this. Pollini never imposed himself too much on the music, never became overly sentimental or took liberties. Conveying the composer’s intentions was his main priority: hence in his best performances he applied only the lightest of filters. This could sometimes lead to accusations of coldness, particularly in his renditions of Chopin. But it’s often forgotten that Chopin was himself the most understated and undemonstrative of pianists, preferring to let his music speak for itself without too much performative drama. He would almost certainly have approved of Pollini’s methods.
While the principles behind Pollini’s playing would change little across his long career, the same could be said of him in a more general way, his values remaining much the same in his mid-seventies as they had been half a century earlier.
His childhood inevitably played a major part in his creative development. Born in Milan in 1942, Pollini’s mother was a trained pianist and singer, his father a renowned architect, while his uncle was a leading modernist sculptor. As a consequence, Pollini recalled, "I grew up in a house with art and artists. Old works and modern works co-existed together as part of life. It went without saying."
His aptitude on the piano was soon apparent, and after winning the prestigious International Chopin Competition in Warsaw at the age of just 18, one of the panel judges, the legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein, said that Pollini was already “technically better” than any of them.
But just as a glittering career beckoned, the young man appeared to hesitate and falter. When a top London orchestra offered him a concert series, he declined, fearing he wasn’t up to it. Deep down, he sensed he was not yet ready to be locked into what he called “a closed compartment as a concert pianist.” He also had a keen desire to expand his horizons beyond the Chopin he had predominantly played in his youth, even if Chopin would remain a lifelong love (“it is amazing that music so completely personal is able to conquer everybody” he once said of the composer).
When Pollini did come back to the concert stage, it was much more on his own terms. Where some performers enjoyed the high life, and might give over a hundred concerts per year, Pollini seldom did more than thirty. An essentially shy man, for many years he refused to talk much between concerts or give interviews. “He does not say a good deal, but he thinks quite a lot”, conductor and composer Pierre Boulez once said of him. Only in old age would Pollini appear to relax and become an engaging interviewee, displaying an unexpected warmth, humour and humanity seemingly at odds with his previously cool exterior.
As a young man, Pollini would develop two important and lifelong passions. The first was a devotion to left-wing politics, during a period of chronic instability and unrest in his country. Although he occasionally flirted with the left’s more extreme ideologies, he always maintained that his involvement was a direct response to the far-right currents still prevalent in his country, which Pollini would describe (right up to the end of his lifetime) as a serious threat to Italy’s democracy.
His activism was mainly confined to making music. Along with his great conductor friend, Claudio Abbado, he would organize free concerts in Milan for workers, students and anyone not normally able to afford classical events. Inevitably, there would be political overtones to some of these. When Pollini wanted to preface one concert by reading out a statement critical of the war in Vietnam, his words were drowned out by an uproar from the audience, after which police arrived and broke up the gathering.
The other great passion Pollini developed in his youth was the championing of avant-garde composers. He would become a particular advocate for the music of Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, performing the most experimental and challenging works by these three composers well into old age, even as he lamented their inability to break into the cultural mainstream.
For Pollini, it remained hugely important to engage with the music of one’s day, no matter the challenges it posed, and not least because he felt the greatest art of every generation had something innately progressive about it. “Art is a little like the dreams of a society”, he would say. “They seem to contribute little. But sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them. In the same way a society cannot live without art."
Despite building up a vast repertoire ranging from Bach to Boulez, Pollini always protested that even the finest performers were limited in how much they could bring to audiences during their lifetime. “My decision to include a piece in my repertoire is based on the absolute certainty that I will never grow weary of the works I’ve selected” he said in 2014. “A pianist has works in his repertoire which he will play again and again in various circumstances and cities. He has to learn and relearn them. He must have with them a special and sustained connection… [I need to] feel that necessity of having a special rapport, implying a serious, scrupulous and repeated study. I therefore stick to the principle of playing things I know for sure I will never grow weary of.”
Countless admirers have nonetheless appreciated the broad-mindedness of his efforts, including his contemporary, Alfred Brendel, who once wrote that great work, "continuously needs to be brought to life, and to relate to our own time. If handled rightly, the result should be far removed from musical consumerism and mental sloth. Ideally, the performer should champion the neglected and the new along with established masterworks, and by no means exclude famous pieces just because they are famous. In his programmes, Maurizio Pollini has admirably stayed this course.”
And of the piano itself? For Pollini it was “a rather neutral instrument” and yet imbued with a “limitless ability to transform itself… To see how this instrument actually reacts, and yields to whatever you want to do, to what you are after, is something quite extraordinary.
“That is why”, he would conclude in one of his final interviews, “I am still so happy to be a pianist.”
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com