Equipped with digital perfection like no other, the Lombard virtuoso looked for an opening to poetry in the score.
La Scala in Milan has announced the death of a great pianist. If Maurizio Pollini, who has just died at the age of 82, is enthroned on the Olympus of piano giants, then perhaps not for good reasons. Because he had a transcendent technique, people wanted to reduce him to a virtuoso, even though he was only interested in the deepest substance of music. Since his playing was sober and devoid of pathos, he was considered cold, although he aimed for nothing other than an almost spiritual ideal of respect for the score. Because he loved creating, he was called modern, even though he approached contemporary music from a classical perspective. These paradoxes he went through, this shy guy almost didn’t recover from them!
Maurizio Pollini was born on January 5, 1942, the son of a Milanese architect, and trained in his hometown before trying his luck in international competitions. In 1957 he won a second prize in Geneva, the first going to his contemporary Martha Argerich: one cannot imagine more different temperaments between the Lombard intellectual and the instinctive Latin American, even if both have the same distrust of each other – given the grayness of career and notoriety . In 1960, five years before Argerich, he won the famous first prize at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. The chairman of the jury, the great Arthur Rubinstein, stated: “ He already plays better than any of us! » Ambiguous statement, as Alain Lompech emphasizes in his work The great pianists of the 20th centurybecause it can be seen as both a grandiose compliment and a qualification, emphasizing what fascinated the audience and the jury: the digital and formal perfection of his playing, at a time when this technical precision was not necessarily the norm among pianists.
While the most prestigious halls and orchestras opened up to him and EMI forced him to record Chopin, he stopped everything for a year to meditate, study and intellectually and spiritually nourish a digital machine like no other. In a crisis of confidence, he consults his great elder Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli to bring his fingers, brain and heart into harmony. Some will criticize the master for emphasizing Pollini’s tendency towards a certain distance. However, when we spoke to him, the words expressiveness and poetry came up most often, much more often than the words form or structure. “ So much for the clichéshe told us. When someone says I’m strict, it’s a compliment. You have to stay true to the text. However, this is only a starting point for developing a free interpretation. The artists I admire Cortot, Houses, Furtwängler, were free. »
After his return, he started his career without making any concessions. He was close to the Italian left, played the avant-garde music of his friend Luigi Nono, a committed communist, and performed in factories with his lifelong accomplice Claudio Abbado, the conductor with whom he played most often. These two scholars share their ideals. Another surprising encounter: the venerable Karl Böhm, heir to the Viennese tradition, took a liking to this young musician, who placed the composer above his own fame. At Deutsche Grammophon, Pollini recorded Chopin, but also Boulez, Beethoven and also Schönberg. We will see how he presents Pleyel with a Stockhausen-Brahms program, starting with the first, which forces the bourgeois public to open up to modernity before returning to more comfort. He always said it: it is not out of obligation or intellectual interest that he is drawn to modernity, but out of pleasure! For him there is no break between Beethoven and Boulez: “ The 2e sonata de Boulez is almost sixty years old and it sounds like it was composed just yesterday! Despite her intellectual appearance, she has a very strong sensual and expressive dimension. In his sonatas, Beethoven plays with extreme register changes, he cuts topics, fragments the language, does not repeat himself: these prejudices are the basis of Boulez’s sonata! »
As he grew older, his clear sound became somewhat darker, and as his fingers lost some of their sharpness, his playing became freer, sometimes at the risk of rounding off the edges. He did not recognize himself in some of his photographs from the first period, for example in this one Studies by Chopin, which he found too percussive and too articulate. What attracted him to the piano was the polyphony, which is why he was also interested in conducting, which he briefly dabbled in and even took up the opera The woman from the lake by Rossini before he left this string to his bow. Undoubtedly, he was too introverted and reserved for this management communications job. However, his chamber music excursions with the Quartetto Italiano and later the Hagen Quartet remain exemplary and timeless.
In recent years, the health of the heavy smoker and tracker (the two undoubtedly go together) had noticeably weakened, which led to him canceling numerous concerts in 2022 and 2023. Not to mention that sad evening in June 2023 at the Royal Festival Hall in London, where, victim of amnesia, he went backstage to look for a score he couldn’t put together and turn the pages, a moment of loneliness that the audience was disturbed by the dismay of this great master. What we will remember, however, are the annual concerts that André Furno organized at the Salle Pleyel, then at the Châtelet and at the Philharmonie de Paris as part of his Piano Quatre Étoiles series, which has never lived up to its name. A master of controlled language who played the classics as if they were modern and the moderns as if they were classic.
