Pianist Maurizio Pollini (Photo by Mathias Bothor)
"Good luck!" was the response of one colleague when I told him I as off to interview Maurizio Pollini. Pollini is one of the most celebrated (and best-paid) pianists alive, who's now been at the very top of the pianistic tree for four decades. But he has a reputation for being aloof and chilly, and replying to questions in monosyllables. And his playing is controversial, to say the least. There are ardent Pollini fans who treasure his ability to catch the finest textural nuances in Chopin and Schumann, and shape a long narrative in a totally compelling way. He's also one of those rare pianists who embraces the classical canon while being passionately engaged with modernist music. Twentieth-century composers Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen mean as much to him as Bach and Chopin.
But there's the rub. A man who likes Boulez must be "intellectual," and intellectuals are always "cool" (in the wrong sense). And so this leads to the other prevalent view of Pollini, which is that he is all head and no heart. But is it true? First impressions of the Pollini household are certainly cool. He lives right in the heart of Milan near the ancient cathedral, in an elegant spacious apartment. The stripped pine walls and clean modernist lines immediately catch your eye. Nothing is out of place, the glass-topped coffee table is spotless and holds nothing except a perfectly placed vase of flowers.
But the man himself, loping towards me with his curious loose-limbed gait is all smiles, and far from monosyllabic. He's looking forward eagerly to a five-concert "Pollini Project" he's playing at the Southbank Centre. "I like very much the London audience, they listen very carefully and are not at all snobbish. My plan is to survey my repertoire, starting with the first book of Bach's 24 Preludes and Fugues, going through late Beethoven and Schubert sonatas, then Schumann, Chopin and Debussy, and also my favorite modern pieces by Boulez and Stockhausen."
So, no Chabrier romps or Godowsky showpieces. It's all music with aspirations to the sublime, with no concessions to ornament. These are the priorities of the heroic age of modernism, and looking round Pollini's spartan apartment, one begins to suspect that he came to the classic masterworks through modernism rather than the other way round. Everywhere there are abstract paintings in plain frames, and what look like architectural designs. Nearly all have family connections.
"Look at this one here," says Pollini with evident pride. "This is a design by my father. He was a modernist architect, one of the 'Group of Seven' who really changed architecture in Italy." Then he leads me over to an exquisite sculptural assemblage of wire and cut metal. "This is by the sculptor Fausto Melotti, who was my uncle. He had a wonderful period in the 1960s." Did his family suffer during the Fascist period? "Well, the Fascists did not like modernism, so my father suffered professionally. But it was not as bad as Nazi Germany, and the war was not so bad. I remember as a child hiding in our cellar to avoid the Allied bombs."
Despite the privations of the post-war period, musical life in Milan was rich. "As a boy, I heard Dimitri Mitropoulos conduct Berg's Wozzeck at La Scala. What a scandal that caused! And so many great pianists came: Walter Gieseking, Wilhelm Backhaus, Clara Haskil, Edwin Fischer. And, of course, Rubinstein." It was Arthur Rubinstein who chaired the jury of the Chopin Competition in 1960, when it was won by the 18-year-old Pollini. "That young man can play the piano better than any of us," said Rubinstein, and the admiration went both ways.
"Rubinstein was already 73 but was absolutely at the top of his form," says Pollini, "and I will never forget the sound he made when he played Chopin's Second Concerto. It was immense, and absolutely filled the space. You know, people think of Chopin as delicate, but his music responds well to a powerful apporach. You rmember that letter of Chopin where he says about Liszt--who was so much stronger than himself--'I would like to borrow his way of playing my music.'"
Now that we're off the subject of himself, and on to his beloved Chopin, Pollini lights up. The words come tumbling out, only pausing when he's at a loss for the right English word. "There is this fascinating dualism in Chopin. On the one hand the music is so passionate, but it is also very strict and has a kind of aristocratic nobility. You know Chopin was so prudish he thought parts of Don Giovanni were vulgar! It is very difficult to combine these two sides of his character."
It's Chopin's Preludes that are clearly uppermost in his mind this morning. "In many of the Preludes, the accompaniment has so much character, almost more than the main line. And sometimes the whole texture is filled with the same idea. For example, the Fourth Prelude--the famous one in E minor--has no big melody, but there is a descending interval which appears equally in all the voices. This reminds me of the way Berg composed."
To hear Chopin compared to Berg is a surprise, and it points towards a deeply held conviction in Pollini. Like T.S. Eliot, he regards tradition as something that is alive across all its parts, a magic realm outside time where in some strange way influence can run in both directions, Berg influences the way we hear Chopin, and Bach foreshadows Beethoven.
Another aspect of Chopin which for Pollini points forward to the Viennese modernists is the sheer concentration of certain pieces. "You know that wonderful 20th Prelude in C minor," he says, singing it in a strange hooded tone that is marvelously expressive. "It lasts only 13 bars, but actually contains four bars that are repeated. Let me show you," he says, jumping up and darting to his music shelves with a kind of shambling eagerness. "You see here? These four bars are the same as these, and over the repeat Chopin writes, 'Petite concession a Monsieur X, qui a souvent raison'--"a small concession to Mr. X, who is often right"! Clearly this Mr. X advised Chopin that the original version of his pieces was too short."
Pollini's deep feeling for the connections between the great composers doesn't blunt his awareness of their differences. "Every composer needs their own sound. In a mixed program it is a wonderful challenge to discover how to make a different world for each composer."
How would he compare Chopin's sound to Beethoven's? "Chopin was close to the character of the piano as he knew it, but Beethoven not so much. He witnessed a great development of the piano, and used pianos of four different sizes of keyboard in his lifetime. I think this encouraged him to imagine that the piano would go on developing after his death, and there are moments when you hear this in his music." Such as? "Those passages in the late sonatas, where the hands are very far apart. I think he imagined a resonance filling the space that a later piano would give. He had a great imagination for these sounds, unlike Schumann who could not bear to leave any empty space. Beethoven loved empty spaces."
All this is persuasive, and could be echoed by many other pianists. What sets Pollini apart is his unshakeable conviction that modernist music makes the same kind of appeal to our imagination, an appeal that can be "read" instantly in the sound of the music by any listener who isn't hopelessly prejudiced. It's a wonderfully utopian idea. But surely Pollini himself must have been bewildered when he first encountered the splintered complexity of Boulez' piano music?
He looks puzzled. "No, I had a wonderful relation with it from the very beginning. But that does not mean it is easy to play. Boulez' music has a very paradoxical character, because on one level it is completely spontaneous and anarchic. But the way these qualities are expressed is very rigorous and precise. You need the synthesis of these two elements, which is very difficult."
This suggests that for Pollini an essential element in musical greatness is a tension between opposites. That tension is certainly audible in the music of Luigi Nono, another of his modernist enthusiasms. Nono was a fervent Marxist who held concerts of avant-garde music in car factories to raise the political consciousness of the masses. Interestingly Pollini remembers hims as anything but fearsome. "We never talked about politics, except when Nono complained about the left-wing city councils in Italy, which tried to block all his initiatives. He was such a warm witty man, never conformist in his views."
Nono's name inevitably leads to the topic of Italian politics now. What does Pollini feel about Berlusconi? He makes a gesture of despair. "A total disaster. It's not the affairs that are the real problem, it is the laws he enacts to protect his position. He is destroying the spirit of the constitution, by small steps. What Berlusconi would like is the power to dismiss parliament, and if he wins that then, well, it's the end. It is tragic because Italy is a country that has strong and beautiful aspects but it makes it impossible for Italy to become a decent European country."
It's clearly a relief for Pollini to turn back to the music of the great tradition. For him it's a touchstone of value, because it unites the two sides of human nature. "For me, complexity and intellectual power are a part of musical expression. Think of all the examples in the history of music of complexity: The Art of Fugue by Bach or the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven, or Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum. There is such enormous emotion in this music! The complexity does not go against the emotion, they go together in the most magical way."
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by Ivan Hewitt, BBC Music Magazine
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