2024-03-25 20:03:33
His interpretations of the piano works of Fryderyk Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven have received acclaim all over the world, and he has collaborated with the La Scala opera house in Milan for decades. It was she who reported on Saturday evening that the Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini died at the age of 82. The news was confirmed by the ANSA agency.
“He was one of the greatest musical figures of our time. Over the course of half a century, he fundamentally enriched the artistic life of the theater,” says a spokesperson for La Scala, where the pianist performed 168 recitals from 1958 to last year. In addition, he prepared countless programs for students, for example.
According to AFP, the virtuoso has struggled with health problems in recent years and had to cancel concerts because of them. This also applied to his last two planned visits to the Czech Republic in 2008 and 2016. He canceled both appearances for health reasons. Other times, world events interfered with his schedule, such as when in March 2020, after the outbreak of the coronavirus, he had to postpone a performance in the Hamburg building of the Elbe Philharmonic on the day of the concert.
Pollini was considered one of the greatest artists of his generation. He specialized in the works of Fryderyk Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, but also interpreted the music of his contemporaries Luigi Nona, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.
“He is relatively taciturn, but he thinks all the more intensively,” Boulez commented on him in 1993. “He goes incredibly deep in music, he doesn’t skim over the surface, and his musical instincts are exactly what his human instincts are,” he praised him.
Born in Milan, he studied piano with Carlo Lonati and Carlo Vidusso. In 1959 he won an international competition in Seregno, Italy, and a year later he won the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, where he triumphed as the first Western performer.
Pollini was one of the world’s most important pianists. | Photo: York Christoph Riccius / DG
It was in the 1960s that he burst onto the world stage and his often ground-breaking interpretations were hard to miss.
“That boy plays better than any of us jurors,” pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who presided over the jury of the Chopin competition, said in tribute to Pollini.
The Italian participant returned to the statement in the new millennium. “He actually said I had better technique than any of the judges. I always understood Rubinstein’s statement to mean that he said it to pick on one of his colleagues. But someone removed the mention of technique, so it became an unnecessarily exaggerated compliment ,” Pollini said in a 2014 documentary.
Immediately after winning the competition, the pianist recorded Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1. At the same time, however, he was surprised when he did not automatically accept all offers, on the contrary, he withdrew from the stage for a while. “I needed to have time to think and decide which way to go,” he later explained to Gramophone magazine. Another factor was that he did not wish to be associated only with Chopin. “I always try to find and uncover what is the essence of the work, its essence,” he described.
Although he gave concerts once in a while in the following years, he devoted more time to studying musical scores. He was tutored by the famous Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, relaxing by playing chess and becoming increasingly interested in politics.
Maurizio Pollini plays Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 accompanied by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Christian Thielemann. Record from 2016. | Video: Berlin Philharmonic
He fully returned to the stages in the late 60s. He made a significant mark in projects with the conductor Claudio Abbad, with whom they tried to make classical music accessible to the widest public. By his side, Pollini already organized concerts for factory workers as a member of the Italian Communist Party.
From the 1970s, he also started recording again, when he established cooperation with the leading publisher Deutsche Grammophon. This gradually published his seminal recordings of works by Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart, Chopin, Schubert and Brahms.
He continued to give a minimum of interviews, weighed every word and for a long time did not participate much in social life, reports the Washington Post, according to which the pianist changed his attitude only decades later.
At the Salzburg Festival in 1995, he presented the Progetto Pollini project for the first time, a series of concerts where he performed old and new works side by side.
Throughout his life, he won other awards, from the Siemens Prize in 1996 to the Diapason d’Or award for his classical music recording in the new millennium, to the American Grammy, which he received in 2007 for his recording of Chopin’s piano nocturnes.
“Probably few would call Pollini a romantic. His total control over the keyboard and emotions is legendary. Some people find his concept cold. But the intellect and the heart are by no means mutually exclusive,” noted critic Dita Hradecká in a radio review of his Chopin recording from 2019 .
According to her, Pollini offered a different kind of intensity live than types on the opposite personality spectrum. “It is a hugely concentrated playing. Nothing here seems to be subject to the momentary mood, the relationships between the notes are thought out in detail,” she said.
In addition to playing the piano, Pollini tried conducting operas and orchestral concerts, especially in the 1980s. He was friends with the conductors Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Chailly.
In 2016, Pollini was to return to the Prague Spring festival after 23 years. This did not happen and he did not arrive again due to health reasons, just like in 2008, when he excused himself from participating in the same show due to a newly set date for a medical procedure. In 2016 he was replaced by Charles Richard-Hamelin, in 2008 he was replaced by Rudolf Buchbinder.
Czech listeners heard the Italian pianist only in 1969, 1982, 1989 and most recently in 1992, when he performed sonatas by Franz Schubert, Alban Berg and Etudes by Claude Debussy to an enthusiastic audience in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum.
“It is always a pleasant experience for me to visit this wonderful city, perhaps the most beautiful in Central Europe,” said Pollini in May 1989, when he received applause for his interpretation of Schumann and Chopin’s music at the Prague Spring.
Video: Maurizio Pollini plays Beethoven
Maurizio Pollini plays Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30. | Video: Deutsche Grammophon