2024-03-23 15:24:02
“I am the son of an architect, so I am always interested in structures. Because it is precisely these often hidden components of music that are so exciting, even if the other parameters – dynamics, rhythm, sound, color – sometimes distract from it a little. That’s why I want to expose it and make it tangible.” This was said by an intellectual of the piano, someone who first thought and then played – Maurizio Pollini.
He not only wanted to spread feel-good moments, but also wanted to stir, perhaps even disturb, at his best. He also brought the music into rooms outside of the concert halls. He was also able to put his convictions into words and made them public.
Pollini was a pianist for thinking people. For many decades at the end of the last century, that wasn’t Igor Levit, but rather the Italian born in Milan in 1942. In another time. Pollini did not play house concerts via the Internet and did not spread the word on social media.
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He lived in a Milanese palazzo, wore the finest Italian cloth in everyday life, and always only wore tailcoats at concerts. And yet he had very decidedly left-wing, even communist views. There was also always a bit of coldness and distance around him. He was an aristocratic figure, albeit a chain smoker.
But crystalline fine, straightforward, well thought out and yet emotionalized and ventilated by warmth, never heat, that was Maurizio Pollini’s Beethoven playing like his Chopin playing. This is how he interpreted Brahms, and later Bach, Debussy and of course Schönberg, Nono, Stockhausen.
A monument, a reliable one, from the start. Maurizio Pollini always lived an extremely upper-class life. Growing up in a music-loving home, he made his public debut at the age of nine. At the age of 18 he graduated from the Verdi Conservatory in his hometown of Milan. He got the final musical touches from the legendary keyboard philosopher Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.
Maurizio Pollini plays Chopin
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Everything always seems easy for this pianist. He had technique anyway, not an infallible one for the sound olympiads of Rachmaninoff or Liszt, composers in which he had little interest, but enough to win a bunch of competitions and get started on the international podiums: at the pianist competition in Geneva in 1957 (no first prize) second. In 1959 he won the Ettore Pozzoli Competition in Seregno, and in 1960 he won the tough Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
Since then, Maurizio Pollini was an idolized, always elegant keyboard star, idolized by women, who soon became close friends with two aspiring Italian musicians: Claudio Abbado, also from Milan, became his favorite conductor, Luigi “Gigi” Nono, the quiet and pensive one Venetian composer, son-in-law of Schönberg, he became the person at heart for the intellectual exchange.
Kashmir Communism
The trio gave concerts together in northern Italian factories in the Seventies, wanting to bring classical music to the workers again and reconcile them with modernity. But there was no contradiction in having dinner with the Agnellis and having glamorous parties afterwards. Kashmir communism à la Italiana.
From the beginning it was there German gramophone Maurizio Pollini’s record company, it still is today. A community of mutuality. He shaped the label that traditionally obliges the Chopin Prize winners and this label him. His playing, like its aesthetics, was always flawless, high quality and noble, clever, considered; perhaps a little surprising. He was a marble pillar of the company – strong, classic, timeless.
And alongside the great classic masterpieces that he knew how to question in exciting new ways – the desentimentalized Chopin, the sad-tragic Schubert, the stern-limbed Beethoven, the enigmatic, even bizarre Schumann – there were always those that were partly composed for him as vehement signs of today Pieces by Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, Luciano Berio, Roberto Carnevale, Bruno Maderna, Giacomo Manzoni and Salvatore Sciarrino.
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Maurizio Pollini’s worldwide Beethoven cycles were concert events in the 1990s, as were his multi-part “Progetti” in Salzburg, London and New York. Pollini was rarely able to amaze, for example when he suddenly conducted his naturally romantic Scottish piece “La donna del lago” at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. Or when he later recorded Bach’s I. Book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, when he heard Debussy’s suite “En blanc et noir” with his son Daniele in 2018.
Of course, that was a late afterglow. Unfortunately, part of the whole, absolutely glorious Pollini truth is that he began to slack off enormously in his sixties and seemed to have lost his enthusiasm and enthusiasm. His concerts, sold out to the last in the Great Salzburg Festival Hall, became celebrations of yesterday, a reminder of what once was. His last CDs reveal a gray routine, the final, confused, partly canceled concerts were tragedies of a fragile man who had aged far too early.
Maurizio Pollini died in Milan on March 23rd. He was 82 years old. His consistently overwhelming sound heritage can be heard on 63 DG CDs and DVDs.
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