R.I.P. Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)

(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

Maurizio Pollini was a guiding light of my musical life: which is to say, he and his music-making were with me from the moment in my teens when I became seriously interested in music. More, composers and performers alike, are gone now than remain with us; I shall not tempt fate by naming those who are left. One of my very first cassette purchases – it may even have been the first – was his recording of Mozart’s Piano Concertos nos 19 and 23 with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. I love it more than I can say. Mozart’s music requires but one thing: perfection. Perfection it receives in what, I suspect, will always be one of my Desert Island Discs. 

In my first London concert, a Prom for which I took the bus up to London and back to Sheffield for a birthday treat with a friend, Pollini was the soloist, again in Mozart, this time in the C minor Concerto, no.24. It was also my first live Schoenberg and Stravinsky (the First Chamber Symphony and Pulcinella, with the CBSO conducted by Simon Rattle). And then, when, as a student, I bought my first ticket for a London piano recital, now taking a return rail journey from Cambridge, it was Pollini: in his beloved Chopin, which by now I knew well enough from recordings, above all those ever-astounding Études and Préludes. What it was, though, to hear him live, as I sat on the Royal Festival Hall stage, incredibly close to the master and his instrument. The technique was of course dazzling, Pollini’s pristine perfection taken by duller souls for a lack of depth or some other such nonsense. I read review after review in which the musical equivalent of the nouveaux riches would lament his technical ability, failing to realise that, like that of any great musician, it was in the service of a musical performance that would have been nothing without it. By now, of course, I knew among other recorded performances that simply astounding DG Originals CD, bringing together two original recordings, of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Webern, and Boulez.

 

Prokofiev and Stravinsky were no longer in his repertory by the time I heard him, but both the Webern (Variations, op.27) and Boulez (Piano Sonata no.2) I would hear live more than once. One of those occasions combined the two, in a 2006 recital at the Salzburg Festival. It had been advertised, somewhat surprisingly, as an all-Mozart recital, but then it was the composer’s 250^th anniversary year. I had longed to hear him in solo Mozart – none of which, so far as I am aware, he recorded – and so I did, in the first half. The second half of the programme, though, he changed to Webern and Boulez, initiating an exodus not only at the interval, not only after the Webern, but unforgivably, during the ice, fire, and elements unknown to this universe of the Boulez. I might have thought I could not admire him any more than I did already; now, however, I did. 

There was so much else, of course, not least the music of Luigi Nono, some of which, quite simply, would not have existed had it not been for his friendship with Pollini (and Claudio Abbado). …sofferte onde serene… I knew it a little from his recording, but to hear it live in London at the Southbank Centre’s courageous ‘Fragments of Venice’ festival in 2007, was truly to hear it for the first time. The last time I did so, at Salzburg in 2019, it was like welcoming an old friend, albeit one who could shock and surprise, as well as seduce, as brilliantly as you could imagine—and then some.

It was an important concert for me in another way too: the first time I had written a programme essay for a Pollini concert. I have no idea whether he would have read it; I am sure he had 1001 better things to do with his time, but a little part of me hopes that he might have done and not found it hopelessly inadequate. (It is perhaps best that I shall never know.) I should like, if I may, to quote the Nono part of that note, not for any intrinsic worth, but simply because in some way, that felt for me to be a moment at which I came closer to Pollini.

 

Such serenity provides both starting point and goal for the poetic idea of Luigi Nono’s 1976 …sofferte onde serene…. The waves are Venetian, so too is the tolling of bells, almost as if transposed from the Vienna of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6 [heard immediately before]. Heard, felt and answered from Nono’s home on the Giudecca, those sounds seem, as with Schoenberg’s, not only to say farewell to earlier, angrier compositional and aesthetic tendencies – tendencies that had culminated for Nono in the high-watermark of his politically committed art, the opera Al gran sole carico d’amore – but also to sustain them in distillation, in further development. ‘I could say’, Nono remarked, ‘as Schoenberg did, that, at the conclusion of each work, I wish more than ever to breathe the air of new planets’. It also continued Nono’s artistic collaboration with Pollini, initiated by Como un ola de fuerza y luz (1971–2), although the two leftist musicians had known each other since the mid-1960s. …sofferte onde serene… displayed, as Nono averred, a reduction in the multiplicity of musical material: a new path taken following a period of compositional silence.

 

That apparent simplification in itself inspired further ‘waves’ – lagoonal and sonic – in collaboration enshrined at the work’s heart, Nono’s purpose amplification rather than counterpoint. Dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini, it operates on two acoustic planes: Pollini live and on tape. They merge, realized in the air through artistry of sound direction – first Nono himself; tonight, André Richard. Vibrations, shadows and resonances sustain and transform memories of loss suffered by composer and pianist. Ghosts of other sounds and works in Pollini’s repertoire are honoured and transformed. (Late, Venetian-themed works by Liszt, La lugubre gondola and R.W. Venezia, were performed at the 1977 premiere.) The moment of Schoenbergian hyper-expressivity – sometimes stark, sometimes on the edge of audibility, sometimes even falling into silence –compels active listening. Nono’s politics have not drowned; they are revealed anew in the waters. So as not to confuse the political ‘provocations’ for earlier works with their substance, we must listen, suffering to break musical silence as the composer did, inspired by his pianist and friend as much as by the instrument. Counterpoint and conflict seem conspicuous by their absence, certainly by comparison to Nono’s preceding works. Whether we feel that absence as an integral aspect of the work is an impossible yet necessary question.

Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono

 

I could list fond memories aplenty: from the time when Pollini played those Schoenberg op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces as a single encore, one of four, to the five-concert ‘Pollini Project’ series at the Festival Hall, which took us literally from Bach to Boulez. A good number of them will be found on my blog in any case, under the Maurizio Pollini tag. There was the Bauhaus, crystalline surface-perfection of his recording of the op.25 Schoenberg Suite for piano, teeming with energy below, and the Orphic taming of the Furies in the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with Böhm. There were Stockhausen and Sciarrino, Schubert, and Schumann. I should at least mention the transition, or so it seemed, to a ‘late Pollini’, in which the technique was not quite so unwaveringly infallible as once it had been, though it certainly remained (until very late) present. Many felt a greater depth, almost as compensation. I know what they meant, but I think it was an illusion: the same old illusion that meant, dazzled and in some curious cases repelled by technique, they had never heard that depth in the first place now led them to hear it more strongly. There was, though, an instructive and touching element of humanity to the ageing process that came to us listeners as much as to the performer. 

Amidst such reminiscences, the communist Pollini’s unwavering political commitment should not be forgotten. It informed his performance as much as it did the compositional work of Nono—or Beethoven. Advocacy of Nono’s music took him and as Abbado beyond the concert hall and the opera house to the car factories of northern Italy. It would have been easier to glory in the world of ‘star performers’, but that was clearly never somewhere Pollini, however fêted, was ever at home. In many ways, his music-making was always a product of the ‘Years of Lead’ in which fascism, openly backed by much of ‘the West’, threatened to occupy much of Europe once again. Speaking in Bettina Erhardt’s wonderful film on Nono, A Trail on the Water, made after Nono’s death, Pollini recalled one incident in particular:

 

There was a lot of tension in the air. We have to remember the situation in Italy back then. People were even talking about a possible Fascist coup. There was the example of the colonels in Greece. The fear of a turn towards authoritarianism was serious. After the massacre on the Piazza Fontana in Milan and the bombs, we took it all the more seriously. I think it was the reaction of the whole country that kept it from happening. Back then, I once read, or rather tried to read, a declaration against a hideous atrocity in the Vietnam War when the United States bombed Hanoi and Hai Phong. Several Italian musicians had signed the declaration: Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono, [Giacomo] Manzoni and the Quartetto Italiano, as well as Goffredo Petrassi, Luigi Dallapiccola. Contrary to all my expectations, at the mere sound of the word ‘Vietnam’, the audience exploded in a kind of collective delirium, which made it impossible to continue my recital. I made several attempts to read this short statement. This was interrupted by the arrival of the police. Eventually the piano was closed and that was that.

He spoke at the protests against Berlusconi almost half a century later too. Maurizio Pollini was a great pianist, a great musician, but above all a great man, a great human being. However unfashionable it may be to say so, for me that shows in his music-making. In recorded form, as in our memories, that will live forever. And we shall be able to tell those younger than ourselves: ‘I heard Pollini.’

Pollini Project (5): Chopin, Debussy, and Boulez, 28 June 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Chopin – Preludes, op.28 (complete)
Debussy – Préludes, Book I (selection)
Boulez – Piano Sonata no.2

Maurizio Pollini (piano)


This scintillating conclusion to the Southbank Centre’s ‘Pollini Project’ reprised the programme I heard Maurizio Pollini give in Berlin last April. Fitting though it seemed to conclude with Chopin, Debussy, and Boulez, it had actually not been Pollini’s intention to do so: this was to have been the fourth instalment of five, but was postponed in April, owing to illness.

Not only had I heard the programme before; it was the third time within less than a year and a half that I had heard Pollini play the complete Chopin Preludes, the first occasion having been here at the Royal Festival Hall, for a Chopin birthday recital. Pollini’s forward-looking yet never anachronistic conception of Chopin arguably benefits still more from being placed in the context of his successors. Or rather, one hears the music differently – and that may well in part be due to Pollini playing it differently. One can debate the ontological status of the musical work until the cows come home; at the moment, that debate seems to have reached something of an impasse. Performance, however, seems to offer something of a way out. Most great works – I was about to say ‘all’, but thought that an unnecessary hostage to fortune – are better than they can be played, not only in the sense Schnabel intended for Mozart, but also in the sense that no single interpretation will be capable of capturing what may sometimes at least be contradictory aspects of their greatness. Contradiction is a perfectly valid way to approach performance, yet so is something that emphasises particular qualities and trajectories.

Pollini’s Preludes were not here merely forward-looking, though I realise immediately that ‘merely’ is a misnomer. Yet the éclat of, say, the G major Prelude inevitably looked forward to Debussy, just as the fury of the B-flat minor Prelude set the scene for Boulez. On the other hand, more ‘traditional’ and just as necessary virtues such as beauty of touch, clarity of tone, and impeccable, more to the point harmonically revealing, voice-leading were equally to the fore, albeit harnessed to a profoundly musical, rather than externally pianistic account of the score. As Liszt appreciated, a pianist must employ virtuosic means to vanquish the merely virtuosic. What struck me in Berlin as it did here, was the balance struck – or better, dialectic experienced – between the demands of the book as a whole, and characterisation of individual pieces. One might have taken the melting accounts of those deceptively simple E minor and A major Preludes by themselves as text-book accounts of miniatures, just as one might have done the limpid ‘Raindrop’ or the post-Mendelssohn A-flat song without words, or indeed the final tempest of the D minor Prelude, perfectly poised between the D minor fury of Don Giovanni and that of the Second Viennese School. Yet, at the same time, one discerned their place in an unstable, yet viscerally thrilling panorama of tonality, which cannot now quite achieve the comprehensiveness of Bach (click here for the beginning of Pollini’s present journey) and which yet develops, perhaps even questions, the implications of Bach’s example.

With Debussy we heard, as the composer wished, a piano without hammers. Yet Pollini ensured equally that there were direction, harmonic motion, and heightened awareness of the composer’s place between Chopin and Boulez. This was no mere impressionist haze, though that should not be taken to deny ‘atmosphere’; there is much, much more to Debussy, though, than atmosphere. I listened to the selection of Préludes – and I am sure this had at least something to do with Pollini’s performance – more as abstract intimations of the Etudes than as character pieces. The titles came last, as they famously do in Debussy’s own practice, placing them at the end, rather than the beginning, of the pieces. That said, there was no lack of wind, albeit never merely pictorial, in the sails of whole-tone exploration in Voiles, nor in Le vent dans la plaine and the sweeping Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest. Boulezian perfume, of the night doubtless but more akin to Mahlerian Nachtmusik than a darkness in which precision cannot be perceived, was to be felt in Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir. A sure hesitancy – if that can be imagined – heightened the exploratory nature in the steps of Des pas sur la neige, which drew, in Pollini's hands, upon a seemingly infinite array of dynamic gradation. La cathédrale engloutie proved a fitting culmination, never too eager to crown: this music simply ‘was’. And in its apparent ‘being’, the monument stood more proudly still.

Despite some extraordinary rudeness from the audience – one woman sitting on the stage almost ran into the pianist in her eagerness to depart before hearing the next piece, whilst a woman two seats away from me shuffled and, mid-performance, asked her husband whether they might leave – Boulez’ second piano sonata, that dialectical work par excellence, offered a truly spellbinding conclusion to this five-concert series. One heard the sonata not simply in the context of Chopin and Debussy, though the technical and harmonic implications of those composers’ works were certainly teased out by the pianist; one also heard ghosts from the earlier composers featured, even when, as in the case of Stockhausen, they came afterwards. Beethoven’s Hammerklavier could not fail to come to mind, of course, as much in the intensification of quasi-fugal destruction and disintegration unleashed in the finale as in the rarity of the air – of another planet? – breathed in the sonatas’ respective slow movements. Yet Bach seemed to be reckoned with too: if the 48 already contains with in itself the chromatic seeds of its own tonal destruction, then Boulez seemed both to celebrate that achievement and to dance upon its grave. Rhythm, in Pollini’s reading, seemed to challenge harmony, not to achieve victory, but somehow to intensify it, very much in the line of Bachian dance and Beethovenian scherzo. The transformations to which Boulez subjected his own scherzo were revealed by Pollini with tender and yet violent care: a typical Boulezian dialectic. For if this were billed as a recital of ‘French’ music, and indeed in a way it was just that, it was only so in one way. There are many paths, and for Boulez, as for modernist music as a whole, the dialectics of a Schoenbergian view of musical history – even when, as in this cycle, and perhaps surprisingly so, the Second Viennese School was not featured – tend to win out. Those who, echoing the young Boulez’s peremptory – albeit in reality, far more nuanced than lazy caricature would suggest – dismissal of Schoenberg, might declare Boulez est mort, should look, and more importantly, listen all around them. This, Pollini showed us, was music that speaks just as intensely to us as it did to the doomed yet understandable desire to scorch the earth in 1948. As the Boulez sonata becomes a classic, and the labyrinth through which Pollini leads us seems to become ever more Bergian, we have not resolved earlier difficulties; they transform themselves, sometimes gracefully, sometimes violently, into new challenges. This is music, Pollini showed us, that will last, that will grow yet further in scope and stature, its implications as limitless as those of serialism itself.


(Pollini's Boulez from 1976)

Pollini Project (4) - Stockhausen, Schumann, and Chopin, 25 May 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Stockhausen - Klavierstücke VII and IX
Schumann – Concert sans orchestre, op.14
Chopin – Prelude in C-sharp minor, op.45
Barcarolle, op.60
Ballade no.4 in F minor, op.52
Berceuse, op.57
Scherzo no.2 in B-flat minor, op.31


Believe not a single word you hear from the Pollini nay-sayers. They were out in force following the first concert in this series, a truly astonishing traversal of the First Book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Suffice it to say, rarely if at all do they listen. They repeat their threadbare dismissal of Pollini as ‘intellectual’, ‘cold’, ‘cerebral’, and so forth, as if somehow it were possible to perform great music without engaging the intellect. Sometimes one might even be treated to a pointless comparison with a pianist such as Vladimir Horowitz, as if that settles the matter. The same sort of people will say the very same things about Pierre Boulez as a conductor; again, they may hear him but they never listen, and nor should we to them. Of course no artist, not even one so distinguished as this, will always perform at his best, but that is another matter and has in any case not applied to a single one of the four recitals heard so far.

This ought to have been the last in the series of five, but the fourth recital, scheduled for the end of last month, had to be postponed. Ending with Boulez’s second piano sonata will arguably make for a still more fitting climax, though I should be surprised if we were not treated to a little more Chopin by way of encores. The present recital, however, opened with two of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. It was said a few years ago that Pollini was set to record the entire set for Deutsche Grammophon; let us hope that that claim will prove to be true. One might choose to programme Stockhausen in the context of the avant-garde, or even solely within the context of his own extraordinary œuvre, but it is equally important to perform music such as these piano pieces for what they have become, classics of the repertoire: piano music as well as music that happens to be written for the piano. I could not help but regret that the pointillism with which VII opens had not been preceded, for contrast as well as comparison, by Webern, but there was boldness in opening with Stockhausen, especially when performed so magisterially as here. What was to be heard, were one to listen, was a performance slightly less crystalline, almost more Brahmsian, than might once have been the case, fully in keeping with the presentation of Stockhausen as classic. The same could be said of Pollini’s reading of the ninth. Serial processes are at work, of course, but so are deeply Romantic, expressive purposes. There was nothing to fault, indeed everything to praise, with the pianist’s exquisite diminuendo upon the celebrated repeated chords, but there was never a sense that this was ‘merely’ technique, nor of ‘iciness’ at all. Again, Brahms seemed closer than armchair decriers of Stockhausen would ever have imagined, had they deigned to listen. One had no need to know of the working of the Fibonacci series to sense something of its kind at work: neither composer nor performer sounded in the slightest didactic.

Schumann has long been a particular favourite of Pollini – and his Schumann has long been a particular favourite of mine. The Concert sans orchestre, moreover, has long been a work Pollini has championed. Inevitably, resonances with the Stockhausen pieces emerged, some mediated by Brahms, Schoenberg, and Webern, some more direct. Schumann seemed to gain in radicalism, whilst Stockhausen gained in classicism. It is all very well to say that, of course, but how? Well, the crystalline quality still present, if lesser than prejudice might have had one believe, in the Stockhausen certainly lived and worked its magic – yes, magic – in Schumann’s work. It enabled fantasy and indeed embodied it, but also imparted and embodied structure. The slow movement variations lost nothing in character, yet also peered forward to Webern’s op.27 – a hyper-Romantic work, if ever there were one – whilst the prowess of a concerto soloist, whether composer or performer, was put to fine use both dramatically and colourfully. More than once I thought of Pollini’s recording of the Schumann Piano Concerto with Claudio Abbado. The technique is still magnificent, if not quite so impregnable as once it was; the pianist’s profound, considered humanity, remains as strong as ever. Prestissimo possible in the finale is an invitation to good sense, to play as fast as is possible, not faster. Nothing was garbled that all might both excite and incite.

What to say of Pollini’s Chopin that has not been said before? Doubtless a great deal, for his enquiring mind has never, whatever his detractors might say, been one to settle upon a reading and repeat it. A greater freedom has continued to be more apparent in recent years, at least when one compares present performances with earlier recordings, stunning though those recordings undoubtedly are. (There may be equally great recordings of the Etudes or the Preludes, but there are none greater.) Perhaps, though, Pollini’s earlier concert performances always told a different tale from his recordings. Having recently heard Charles Rosen give, to my great sadness and surprise, one of the worst professional Chopin performances I have ever experienced, it was instructive, but far more importantly, a true delight to hear Pollini in some of the same repertoire. Where Rosen’s Barcarolle proved a drudge, as if the gondola were dredged, Pollini’s sense of line and unobtrusive phrasing, his infinite gradations of touch, enabled the emergence of a poetic impression such as could only be produced by a first-rate technique, though of course such technique is a beginning, a liberation of the poetic impulse, never an end in itself. The C-sharp minor Prelude bewitched, Pollini’s voice-leading here as elsewhere designed to facilitate harmonic and melodic momentum, not, as one too often hears from other pianists, to underline certain parts for the sake of sounding different. His touch, moreover, remains a wonder: both awe-inspiringly precise and yet perfectly capable of melting where necessary, or desirable, as in the ravishing first encore, the D-flat major Nocturne, op.27 no.2, and the Berceuse, which showed that charm and rigour are as one in performance and composition.

The F minor Ballade told a tale of anguish and anger, but equally of pianistic exploration. Liszt, who had originally been programmed rather than Chopin, was to a certain extent still present in spirit, though of course it is in many ways Chopin’s example that sets free Liszt’s musical, as opposed to technical, imagination. Moreover, the nobility with which Pollini told the tale was all the greater for its universalism. There was to this reading, as to that of the second scherzo, nothing narrowly nationalistic. Nor, indeed, is there to Chopin’s music. The vehemence Pollini imparted both to that coruscating reading of the scherzo and to truly bravura performance of the second encore, the ‘Revolutionary’ Study, was all the greater for having moved far beyond a simple, sub-biographical response. Art, in the hands of a true artist, poses difficult questions more often than it answers them.

Pollini Project (3): Schubert, 26 February 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Sonata in C minor, D 958
Sonata in A major, D 959
Sonata in B-flat major, D 960

Maurizio Pollini (piano)


Many apologies for the length of time it has taken to write this up. Immediately after the recital – though I do not think we should consider it to be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc – my computer contracted a virus, so I have been unable to write for a few days. My memory will doubtless be somewhat fallible by this stage, since I made no notes, so the review will be relatively brief and more generalised than has often been the case. I was determined, however, to write something, so as to maintain the journal aspect of this extraordinary series.

I hope that readers will not tire of my paeans to Maurizio Pollini’s musicianship. I can only assure them that there is no a priori reason for me to be singing them; it is simply a matter of Pollini impressing even beyond highest expectations. Moreover, the challenges he has set himself are great, even by his standards: first Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier, then the final three Beethoven sonatas, now the final three Schubert sonatas. If anything, to perform all three of the Schubert group is a taller order still than to perform the Beethoven equivalent, certainly in terms of endurance, though Pollini wisely permitted himself an interval on the present occasion.

This, as one might have predicted, was no comfortable, Biedermeier Schubert: how could it be, with three sonatas all completed in September 1828, less than two months before his death? Yet nor was there anything mawkish, or even morbid, about Pollini’s performances. Indeed, I wondered to begin with whether the urgency of the C minor sonata’s opening Allegro was a little de trop; the fault, however lay with the listener, not the pianist, as he drew his audience in to a searingly dramatic, defiant dramatic re-telling: drama, however, through iron-clad understanding and communication of the structure, rather than attention-seeking rhetoric. (May the Almighty call my days to an end before I must endure Lang Lang in late Schubert!) Likewise the tempo for the first movement of the A major sonata: I might have thought it on the fast side in abstracto, yet in context, it was unerringly right: worlds away from Richter, but often, as Schoenberg remarked, it is the middle road that does not lead to Rome. One could throughout sense the proximity to Beethoven, but also, crucially, the difference. Schubert’s tonal strategies, those glorious, heart-stopping modulations, the sometime subversions of Beethoven’s dominant pull through three-key expositions: all these were tellingly sculpted, as if, I thought, from Carrara marble – and musically dramatised. There was, moreover, not a single instance in which Pollini failed to maintain the long line: throughout this extraordinary three-sonata journey, that long –distance hearing (Fernhören) on which Furtwängler often remarked, was inescapably present. Schubert may present us with ‘heavenly lengths’, but heavenly and justified they are.

And so, it was perhaps no surprise that Pollini, even in this particular programme, did not shirk the exposition repeat in the final sonata. Whilst I could not help but admire Alfred Brendel’s persistent refusal to bow to fundamentalist pressure in that respect, Pollini’s profoundly unsettling, Schoenbergian traversal of the first-time bar convinced one of its necessity. Nowhere, of course, is the expressive blurring of major-minor boundaries more painfully present than here; the time for Mozartian smiling through tears is almost, yet not quite, beyond us. This historical, dramatic necessity was as powerfully conveyed as I can imagine, indeed more so, likewise the threat of disintegration from triplets and hemiolas. And the trills, those left-hand trills: all the more frightening for being so perfectly placed into their context. A better world was vouchsafed, yet ultimately denied, by the well-night unbearable slow movement: one knew that this was not so much unreal, as too real for us. It would be a poor performance indeed that did not breathe the air of another planet when it came to that extraordinary modulation to C major, but this was Alpine air as rare, as Webern-like as I can recall. Pollini also judged to near perfection that difficult limpness of the scherzo: it is extraordinarily awkward to play, or rather to play as the music demands it to be played. Then the left-hand stabs – never have I heard them so terrifying – of the finale, its silences, its attempts to pick itself up again: this, one felt, was the end, not only of the recital, but of something more.

Pollini Project (2): Beethoven, 15 February 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Sonata no.30 in E major, op.109
Sonata no.31 in A-flat major, op.110
Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111

Maurizio Pollini (piano)


For the second of his five recitals, Maurizio Pollini followed up Book One of the piano’s Old Testament with the final three chapters of the New, though one might perhaps be better to leave Hans von Bülow on one side and speak of the holy ground of Mount Sinai. Without the slightest preciousness – indeed, I cannot think of a less precious pianist – Pollini left us in no doubt of the sheer greatness not only of the final three Beethoven sonatas but of his musicianship. This, quite simply, was musical performance of a kind one would be blessed to hear but once in one’s life – and there are still three recitals to come.

Wisely, Pollini elected to give the three sonatas without an interval, allowing one all the more clearly to make any connections one might wish. They were not elided into one super-sonata, but the kinship as we ascended Parnassus was undeniable. Opening with the E major sonata, op.109, we were immediately plunged into a world both rarely divine and utterly human. The complaints one occasionally still hears concerning alleged distance, coolness, whatever it might be, could not have been more soundly refuted. This was pianism of an intensity that both incorporated and surpassed what one might almost dare to call ‘mere’ Romanticism. The first movement’s tempo changes were as convincingly handled as I have heard, not merely in technical terms, but above all with respect to Beethoven’s meaning: we might not be able to convey that meaning in words, but that does not mean it is not there. The sheer beauty of the chordal passages was something to savour in itself, though never narcissistic. Now that Pollini is occasionally a little more fallible technically than once he was, one might argue that the sense of struggle is all the greater; such was certainly the case with the Prestissimo. Not that there is anything technically lacking, far from it, but the way a pianist approaches this music at different times in his life can – and certainly did – emphasise certain aspects more or less. I should never want to be without earlier recordings, but, had I to choose, the philosophical humanism of this account would win out. The closing theme and variations were a case in point: Gesangvoll mit innigster Empfindung, Beethoven writes for the theme, adding the vocal mezza voce, and this was precisely what we heard – and what we heard extended, transformed, throughout the movement’s progress, the trills as melodic, as non-ornamental, as anyone could ever have heard. For once, I shall leave the matter of coughing aside, irritating though it was; however, I am sad to report that it became increasingly difficult to listen, try as one might, owing to what sounded like a malfunctioning hearing aid. Doubtless it was an accident, but might I make a plea to those sporting such devices to take care as paranoid as mine when it comes to my telephone? It was a great sadness indeed to have such a performance severely compromised.

Songfulness was equally the hallmark of the first movement of op.110, its trills again being a case in point. The Allegro molto was urgent, vital in every sense of the word, but never brash. Pollini seems to have developed a mellower touch – and I suspect that he was assisted by an excellent instrument in this case. Rarely if ever can the una corda passage have sounded so magical; whatever the ideologues might tell you, there is absolutely no need for a period instrument here. The handling of the ensuing recitative was equally fine, capturing in perfect balance – or dialectic – the demands of the apparently improvisatory and dramatic necessity, before arioso painful and yet consoling beyond words was heard. Fugal lessons learned from Bach – both by Beethoven and Pollini – were very much to be heard thereafter, its inversion in both composition and performance as much a masterstroke, or so it seemed, as the Art of Fugue itself. Now could Pollini be persuaded to perform that…?

Beethoven’s C minor daemon was not yet slain, of course, as op.111 showed beyond doubt. Yet Pollini captured to near perfection the tension between recollection, perhaps even intensification, of earlier struggles, and a new, ‘late’ voice. This should not sound like op.13, and did not, though the composer was recognisably the same; something more was at stake. Counterpoint and harmony sounded as two sides of the same late Classical coin, which is just as it should be – though far rarer in performance than one might suspect. The second movement captured equally well the balance and/or dialectic between sublime simplicity and necessary complexity. Pollini made no apologies for passages that lesser souls might consider harmonically ‘simple’; the placing of every note was truly made to tell. There are, or at least were, many great tunes still to be written in C major, with apologies to Schoenberg. Rhythm, including harmonic rhythm, was key throughout. I cannot recall a performance in which the astounding ‘boogie-woogie’ variation sounded so well-performed; it still astonished, of course, but it grew inexorably from what had gone before. Beethovenian variation is something very special indeed. So were these performances.

Later this month, we shall hear the final three Schubert sonatas...

Pollini Project (1): Bach, 28 January 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Well-tempered Clavier, Book One

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

With this recital, Maurizio Pollini opened a five-concert series at the Royal Festival Hall. Subsequent concerts will feature: the final three Beethoven piano sonatas; the final three from Schubert; a ‘French’ exploration of music by Chopin, Debussy, and Boulez (the second sonata, which Pollini performed so magnificently last year in Berlin; and last but certainly not least, in May, more Chopin, Schumann, and Stockhausen. I cannot help but regret the absence of the Second Viennese School; Pollini has after all recorded the piano works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern in versions that may occasionally be equalled but could hardly be surpassed. However, given the riches on offer, it would be ungracious in the extreme to carp further. Everything is welcome; it is a sign of the pianist’s greatness that one wishes there could be more still. Certainly that was my fervent desire at the end of tonight’s recital, the first time I had heard Pollini play Bach in concert.

This was not just any Bach, of course, but the first book of the Well-tempered Clavier. As I remarked upon hearing Angela Hewitt perform the same music almost precisely two years ago, every cliché about this ‘Old Testament’ of the piano repertoire is true. None, however, comes close to expressing its greatness; only study and performance can accomplish that. Even the first book, let alone both taken together, seems to encompass everything ; perhaps it does. Yet there is always a danger that in considering a great work of art to be ‘about’ everything, it might seem to become about nothing in particular. One has to make choices, considered choices one would hope, but in the knowledge that any conception will remain partial. Performing the book as a whole is likely to give rise to different choices – different problems and opportunities too – than if one were performing one or more of the Preludes and Fugues in a mixed recital. This goes for the listener as well as the performer – and, one would hope, for the scholar too, if only he might prove brave enough to shun the idiocies of ‘authenticity’.

Pollini certainly enabled one to consider the book as a whole. Just as, last year in the same venue, he had presented the complete Chopin Preludes as a conspectus of the tonal universe, impressing upon one, though never pedantically, the enormous debt Chopin owed to Bach, here Pollini returned the compliment and went further. Bach’s music emerged as the centre not only of the tonal universe, every key, major and minor, treated both individually and as part of a total scheme of creation, but also of musical history. No single piece was over characterised in terms of the greater whole; by the same token, none sacrificed its individual qualities for the sake of that whole. Bach and Pollini opened up a myriad of connections; it barely matters which were intended and which were not. The grave stile antico fugues, for instance that in C-sharp minor, paid homage to the great age of polyphony – and perhaps to a conception of history that has Bach as its culmination: the ‘everything leads up to him’ approach. In many ways it does, but it seems equally the case that almost everything comes from him – give or take a Berlioz, and even Debussy admitted that one had to learn how to write a fugue in order not to have to write a fugue. The labyrinthine ways of Romanticism and the Second Viennese School are all present here, and they certainly were in, for instance, the extraordinary Largo fugue in B minor with which the book concludes. From the moment I laid eyes upon it, and then began to learn to play it, Berg above all other composers came to my mind. Pollini may not be performing the Berg Sonata in this series, but I felt satisfied that I had in any case heard here a performance that took in the cumulative power and dramatic integrity of Wozzeck.

The Bach of the Passions was here too – at least the Passions as we used to hear them, when they were understood to have subject matter rather than machine patterns. In the G-sharp minor Prelude, one might have thought oneself in a successor to one of the great choruses, whilst its successor fugue cast its chromatic lance far into the future, dissonances relished not in themselves – this is not Debussy – but because of where they are placed and why. Their emancipation may seem imminent but it is not immanent. What did sound immanent, however, were the very spirit of music and of musical exploration. Perhaps Liszt was not the only composer of Faustian music for the piano.

If pushed to find fault, I might point to the A-flat major Prelude, which, for all its declamatory quality, might have benefited from a little light and shade. Yet that lack was so unusual that it almost provided variation in itself, a further layer to Bach’s – and Pollini’s – achievement. There were very occasional slips, yet they mattered not at all; if anything, they, along with the pianist's singing, further deepened the profound humanity of the performance, hammering a final nail into the coffin of the always absurd charge of icy perfectionism.

I almost resist the temptation to say this, but sadly a report would be quite distorted if I did not mention the distracting antics of a pernicious section of the audience. All of the usual bronchial disturbance was present, but in greater degree than I have suffered for a while. I also had the misfortune to suffer next to me a heavy breather who from time to time would rub with his foot a plastic bag beneath his seat; I cannot imagine that there were not similar cases around the hall. If only it were possible to ignore the coughing and the rest … but when music and performance demand that one concentrate so closely, one simply cannot. Pollini seemed irritated, and began to pre-empt the coughs. To an extent, that added to the cumulative effect of the performance, but performing choices should not have to be based upon lessening selfish behaviour. Nevertheless, as soon as the performance was over, my first thought was how I wished I could hear it again – and, if at all possible, at once.

Details of the remaining performances may be found by clicking here. Beg, borrow, or steal, if you must...