It was 50 years ago that the then 18-year-old Maurizio Pollini won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Held once every five years, the competition's stature is evidenced not only by its winners – Martha Argerich and Krystian Zimerman followed Pollini – but by its losers: both Vladimir Ashkenazy and Mitsuko Uchida were runners-up. In 1960 Pollini was the youngest of the 89 entrants. The judges included Nadia Boulanger and chair Artur Rubinstein, who declared: "that boy plays better than any of us jurors." Pollini's triumph confirmed the scale of his emerging talent, but it was his response to winning that proved to be one of the defining facets of his subsequent career. It is has become part of the Pollini myth that after his victory he became something of a recluse, prone to nerves and cancellations, who didn't properly re-emerge until the late 1960s, by which time his youthful verve and engagement had been transformed into a dauntingly icy professionalism.
Pollini's restrained on-stage demeanour and dapperly conservative off-stage appearance indeed promote a strong sense of detached accomplishment. But he is by no means a "musical adding machine", as he was once described. His distinguished silver hair, aquiline profile and line in smart grey suits may have prompted the observation that he resembled a typical Fiat factory executive, but in reality his political history reveals him as closer to a typical Fiat factory union organiser. He continually fishes in the pockets of those expensive jackets for an apparently never-ending supply of cigarettes, smoking no more than a quarter before stubbing one out and lighting another. Speaking in his London hotel suite – the connecting suite used purely for his practice mini-grand piano – he is in fact sociable, relaxed and eager to trade industry news and word of his fellow travellers on the global merry-go-round of top-level classical music.
As for the aftermath of Warsaw, he acknowledges that "the natural thing for me to have done having won was to play concert after concert after concert. It's true that I wasn't willing to become a Chopin specialist, but the idea that I was a recluse really has been overstated. I was very young and thought I needed more time to develop my musical interests and a bigger repertoire. I wanted to explore other arts and other things. So I stayed away from concerts for about a year and a half, and when I returned I didn't take on too many. But I always enjoyed performing and I made my debut in London in 1963. By the end of the 60s my performance schedule had extended itself to a more normal rhythm. As for my progression as a performer, I'll leave it to others to say, but some development and change at that stage of your career is hardly unusual."
Pollini's technical mastery is undisputed, but the idea that he is too emotionally detached, that he "interrogates" music as opposed to conducting a "sympathetic interpretation", has become a commonplace of discussion about his work. One of his greatest champions was Edward Said, who presented the other side of the coin. Said praised Pollini for his commitment to music and excluded him from the generality of "most pianists", who, Said claimed, are like "most politicians" in that they "seem merely to wish to remain in power". Instead, with Pollini his "technique allows you to forget technique . . . what comes through in all Pollini's performances is an approach to the music – a direct approach, aristocratically clear, powerfully and generously articulated." Said went on to say that "even when Pollini doesn't achieve this effect – and many have remarked on his occasional glassy, tense, and hence repellent perfection – the expectation that it will occur in another of his recitals remains vivid. This is because for the listener there is a sense of a career unfolding in time. And Pollini's career communicates a feeling of growth, purpose and form."
It is a career that has encompassed radical left-wing politics and been fired by a punishing perfectionism (for which London audiences ought to be grateful, in that it was Pollini's threat to cancel a 1983 concert at the Barbican because of its notoriously poor acoustics that began the process of improving the hall's sound). Most of all, it has combined the great peaks of the classical and romantic piano repertoires with a commitment to new music. Alfred Brendel, one of the few pianists who can write from an equally elevated position, explains that great work "continuously needs to be brought to life, and to relate to our own time. If handled rightly, the result should be far removed from musical consumerism and mental sloth. Ideally, the performer should champion the neglected and the new along with established masterworks, and by no means exclude famous pieces just because they are famous. In his programmes, Maurizio Pollini has admirably stayed this course."
There will be opportunities to assess a very large part of Pollini's career in London this year as he embarks on a five-concert Royal Festival Hall season spread over five months that is both a history of piano music and a statement of his relationship to it. Starting with a Bach concert on 28 January, he will then play the late sonatas of both Beethoven and Schubert before a "French" programme of Chopin, Debussy and Boulez and a concluding concert in May featuring Schumann, Liszt and Stockhausen. "I have played a recital in London more or less every year throughout my career and have a very strong relationship with the London public," he explains. "I like their way of listening and their deep interest in music, and so I thought it was possible to do something larger and different. I have played these works many times and they are all extraordinarily important works for the piano. Put together, they form something of a line, something of a story of piano music. But it is not a rigorous or strict line. They are closely connected to me and my overall musical interests, so it is also my personal line and, in a way, my personal story."
Pollini was born in Milan in 1942. His father, Gino Pollini, was a well-known architect – "one of the first people in Italy to introduce modern architecture in the 1930s" – who was also a keen amateur musician. His mother had trained as a pianist and singer, and his uncle, Fausto Melotti, was a leading Italian modernist sculptor. "I grew up in a house with art and artists. Old works and modern works co-existed together as part of life. It went without saying."
His musical talent was recognised early and he was sent to a piano teacher at the age of six. Later he remembers being given a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos when he had his tonsils removed and attending a Toscanini rehearsal at La Scala. By the age of 15 his Milan recital of Chopin's Etudes had been well reviewed in the Italian press. Despite attending the Milan conservatoire, Pollini carried on with normal school studies alongside music. "I was interested in many things, and it wasn't until I was relatively old that I worked purely on the piano. It was not that I wasn't dedicated to the music, which I was, it was just that I wasn't really thinking that much about my future. Of course, in hindsight, there was never any other life that I realistically could have taken."
Despite his protestations, his immediate post-Warsaw career was not plain sailing. An American tour was postponed, and his 1963 London debut, playing Beethoven's third piano concerto with the LSO under Colin Davis, was dismissed as "rushed" by the Times, which claimed that "his only concern seemed to be getting the notes over and done with".
Pollini studied briefly with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and, as his repertoire developed back into the classical and romantic canon, he also began a deep engagement with the music of his own time. In the 60s he started his relationship with the music of both Stockhausen and Boulez, whose second piano sonata has become one of his signature pieces – he will play it at his April concert at the Royal Festival Hall. "It is a piece of music that has everything. A masterpiece. The so-called emotional aspect that is so valued in the great works of the past is very evident here. It should be appreciated and understood by the general public far better than it is."
He says that while Stockhausen and Boulez are "completely established, they are still not that often performed. For me they are wonderful and classic pieces of the repertoire. We now see Stravinsky and Debussy and Ravel and Bartok as part of the normal repertoire. I would add Berg to that list and say that Schoenberg and Webern are almost on it. The great masters of the second half of the 20th century – Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, Ligeti – still appear to be a little further away from the general public as everyday music for a normal concert."
Pollini's relationship with the Marxist avant garde composer Luigi Nono, whom he first encountered in the mid-60s, has been one of the most important of his career. "I became a great enthusiast for his music and asked him to compose something for the piano. That took quite a lot of courage because it seemed that the piano was completely outside of his interests at that time." Nono, who had already written work condemning American involvement in Vietnam, composed two pieces for Pollini, including one for piano, voice and tapes, that commemorated a murdered Chilean revolutionary.
And Pollini's involvement in new music went hand in hand with the polarised politics of the time. He, Nono and their friend, the conductor Claudio Abbado (under Abbado's baton Pollini has since gone on to play with some of the great orchestras of the world), performed radical work all over Italy and encouraged new audiences to attend traditional concert halls, "The starting point was that art should be for everybody," Pollini says. "At La Scala there was someone who had contact with the local factory councils, which were not trade unions but directly run by workers. So with Abbado at La Scala we gave a cycle of concerts for students and workers. As an attempt to build a new public it was very positive and interesting, but the ideas were not really taken forward or developed further."
Pollini married in 1968 and has one son. Although on the radical left in the 1970s, he says he had no time for that decade's violent revolutionaries in Italy. "The centre and right parties were totally corrupt, but the so-called revolutionary left had a terrible influence and actually allowed the right to get more power. There were bombs and murders. There is a lot of suspicion to this day as to right-wing conspiracies and who actually did what and who knew what. But in the end these 'awful people of the left' proved very useful for the right."
He remains a man of the left and despairs of Silvio Berlusconi's continuing grip on power. "It is a different situation to the 70s, but it is still a terrible state of affairs. Berlusconi is taking one step after another to become a dictator in passing laws which are in conflict with democracy. What is happening is a farce and in one sense it is obviously comical and embarrassing, but it is also very dangerous, and the left seems too weak to provide effective opposition. And in artistic terms the situation is deplorable. Obviously there is a financial crisis, but this government is actually against culture, and their cuts are making life for musical institutions almost impossible, which is an unnecessary disaster."
His strong belief in the social benefits of art remains undimmed. "I think great art has entirely progressive aspects within it, elements that are somehow outside the detail of the text or even the political opinions of the person who made it. Art itself, if it is really great, has a progressive aspect that is needed by a society, even if it seems absolutely useless in strictly practical terms. In a way art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art."
He says he is in some ways disappointed that work he has been championing since the mid-60s has yet to break through to general acceptance. "It was always a difficult task. In the 1970s there was a movement that could well have propelled this music more into the mainstream. If that movement had succeeded then you wouldn't have to make any special case to play Stockhausen's Klavierstücke. But somehow it didn't happen, and since then there has been a tendency not to push forward the contemporary boundaries of the core repertoire. And so we have to go on making the case."
And whether the work is old or comparatively new, he says the real interest comes from the fact that it is composed in "a strong and vibrant new language, which Chopin's and Beethoven's were in their time, just as Boulez's and Nono's have been in theirs. And contemporary music has within it both a link to the past, from the older music it developed out of, and, if it is of the highest quality, a life of its own in which it matures and develops over time."
His relationship with the music to be played in his London season goes back 40 or 50 years. "And over that time it becomes better and more rewarding. It doesn't matter if you play these pieces all the time, or go for years without playing them at all, which often happens to me. They are always there in your mind. You think about them and refer to them all the time. You also entertain the hope, although it is sometimes an illusion, that you will understand them a little better over time. These are relationships that go on forever, and so long as you keep playing the piano they will never be concluded."
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