Maurizio Pollini is always worth celebrating, and his 60th birthday gives us
special cause to do so. And since the occasion has triggered a retrospective
12-CD box from a grateful Deutsche Grammophon, we now have a handy reminder of
his scope. The Schubert reflects his ability to spin the most intimately homely
melodies, the Webern reveals his miniaturist delicacy, while the Luigi Nono and
Giacomo Manzoni indicate his adventurous rigor. His Chopin Etudes go like the
wind; his Debussy Etudes are at once immaculately limpid and passionately felt;
his versions of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and of the "Marche funèbre" from
Chopin's Second Piano Sonata reflect his hatred of empty histrionics. No
Petrushka ever sounded as poised and translucent as that recorded here:
in place of the folksy Russianness most pianists strive for, Pollini irradiates
it with a rational European light. He brings his own peculiar perfection to
everything he touches, but, as this collection proves, each work speaks for
itself, and with unfailingly revelatory results.
A supreme artist, and a supremely elusive man: my first interview with him
— which he only agreed to under pressure from his agents — was
uphill all the way. It took place at his home in Milan: the upper floor of a
ducal palazzo in a dark side street — and unmistakable, despite
the absence of any nameplate, thanks to the whirling Beethoven scherzo emanating
from the open windows. His wife welcomed me in and sat me down in an airy
antechamber, from which I glimpsed a huge room lined with books and maquettes.
This seemed appropriate for a man whose father was a leading Rationalist
architect, and whose uncle — by all accounts a big influence —
was a prominent sculptor. Born in Milan in 1942, Maurizio Pollini has lived in
this city all his life: everything in his background proclaims the stability of
continuity.
The scherzo stopped, and a flustered figure emerged, awkward in contrast to his wife's cheerful ebullience: if I'd met him in the street, I would have supposed him a dentist. But watching him take up a position in the antechamber as far away as possible from mine, I realized that I was to be the dentist, with a patient who needed reassuring that the extraction wouldn't hurt.
Asked about his beginnings, he described his cultured home-life, his memory of sheltering from bombs at the end of the war, and his early piano studies. He was lucky, he said, in that his tutor allowed him to play pieces way beyond his capacities, and that many of them were by Beethoven. "The memory is better when you are very young. You are more impressionable." He apologized for his English, which was formal, with a strong Italian accent. "But it was not a fixed idea from the start, that I should become a pianist. I didn't practice much when I was young — it all started very slowly. I did a few concerts in my adolescence." At 13 he was withdrawn from normal schooling and put under a private tutor; at 18, to his surprise, he won the Warsaw Chopin Competition. He made this all sound distant, as though of little interest. Did he ever suffer from nerves? A sudden laugh. "Not at that age! I was completely... perhaps naive? I had very little fear at that time." And now? "Now is a little more complicated. I do not feel anxiety about anything technical. It's an anxiety in general, about the performance." Looking back to his fear-free childhood he sounded wistful, as though adult knowledge weighed on him.
After Warsaw he withdrew from the concert scene for 18 months: the sudden pressure was too much. Did he feel isolated? "Perhaps. I came back home to Milan. My real career started slowly later, step by step." In the Sixties all the great pianists came to Milan: he heard them and got to know them. The swashbuckling Arthur Rubinstein confided to him about pre-concert nerves; Michelangeli — the most eccentric perfectionist of the century — became his teacher. He began to record, and to make a name for himself as a champion of Boulez and Stockhausen.
In the Seventies he acquired a reputation as a Communist champion of art for the masses, performing in factories with Claudio Abbado, but he modestly downplays the political significance of this. "We gave a few concerts in Reggio Emilia, but it was not a way of life. Our idea was that art should be at the disposal of everybody: we wanted to find a new public."
This went hand in hand with his conviction that musical life must constantly
renew itself — a theme to which he has returned in all our subsequent
conversations. "It's the performers' absolute responsibility to put new music in
their programs. They must break down the audience's prejudices." Aren't some of
those prejudices a reaction to compositional arrogance? "No, I don't feel that.
I can see why one might ask a composer to write more accessibly, but —
looking at things a posteriori — I find the only interesting
works are those composed in an uncompromisingly modern musical language
— as Beethoven's was in his time. The only way to create important
works is through a totally contemporary and difficult language. This is
not perversity — it is a creative necessity. It is for the public to
understand: it is not for the composer to put water into his imagination. The
composers must follow their own clear way — and the public must follow
after them." There must be no dilution of the avant-garde urge.
Hence his frequent twinning of Beethoven and Schoenberg; hence the two-year series of concerts, covering two millennia of composition, which he masterminded at Carnegie Hall. Hence his insistent championing of Stockhausen's Klavierstück X, whose pedalled chords hang like parallel wires in the sky, whose fistfuls of note-clusters explode among fields of savage glissandos, and for which Pollini wears gloves to protect his hands from laceration. "With Boulez, Stockhausen is one of the two great masters of the late twentieth century," he insists. He doesn't object in principle to "new tonalists" like John Adams: he just doesn't rate what they do.
Indeed, he's planning to record Klavierstück X for Deutsche Grammophon, but any mention of the recording industry causes his brow to cloud. His contract stipulates that none of his slower-selling records be dropped from the catalogue, but he's mistrustful of what the cash-strapped classical labels, with their desperate merging and down-sizing, may do next. "Contemporary repertoire is just a side-issue for them," he says. "If their current attitudes continue, chamber music will be at risk also, because it's not as popular as sonatas and symphonies. Soon all we may be left with are a few overworked symphonies."
A passing mention of the new Sony philosophy — that "core repertoire" recordings are dead, and that crossover stunts are where it's at — brings Pollini as close to an explosion as his reserved and gentlemanly manner will allow. "Awful! We must protest. Such thinking is wrong even in commercial terms — they will lose their market, it won't exist any more. And anyway, what crossover can a pianist play, apart from Piazzolla's tangos?" In which, he admits, he has no interest.
The most remarkable thing about Pollini is not his proselytizing zeal for new
music, but his unflagging determination to shed new light on the classics. His
recent recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations is a perfect case in
point: seldom has the work's architecture shone through with such vivid clarity,
yet for this he disclaims responsibility. "My attention is almost entirely
focused on the expressive character of each piece, not on the global whole. When
I learn a new piece, I try to work as quickly as possible at first; I have to
know how it sounds, before I can begin to work on what it means."
And this approach typifies everything he does. His recent record of the
Chopin Ballades may at first blush initially seem to short-change the poetry of
these works, but each is a marvelously wrought, and intensely dramatic, whole.
"No other composer has ever attained Chopin's sound world," he says, while
violently disagreeing with the purists who religiously play him on an 1830
Pleyel. "It's a mistake to think that composers were always in harmony with the
possibilities of the instruments at their disposal. Just as Beethoven's
imagination went far beyond the possibilities of the pianos — and the
orchestral instruments — he had, so did Chopin's. He wrote for a better
piano than existed then — or that even exists now." As far as pianos
are concerned, Pollini doesn't believe we've reached the end of history. "There
is no reason why the piano should not go on evolving." Ditto Maurizio
Pollini.
