The Pianist as Master Architect

****

“Maurizio Pollini Edition”

Deutsche Grammophon

****

SCHUMANN

“Davidsbudlertanze,”

“Concert sans Orchestre.”

Maurizio Pollini, piano

Deutsche Grammophon

****

SCHUMANN

“Kreisleriana,” “Gesange der Fruhe,”

Allegro in B minor

Maurizio Pollini, piano

Deutsche Grammophon

His father, Gino Pollini, was a Milanese Modernist architect. His uncle, Fausto Melotti, a Modernist sculptor. And more than any other pianist, Maurizio Pollini is a builder.

Everything he plays--visionary Beethoven, poetic Schumann, crystalline Debussy or coolly calculated Boulez--sounds constructed from the bottom up, the interpretations built layer upon imposing layer. Pollini shapes his performances out of a piano tone so solid that it feels as if it were physical substance. He grounds himself so thoroughly in the music that he inhabits it; he doesn’t take listeners along for a ride, as does, say, Martha Argerich, so much as invite them into it with him.

In January, Pollini turned 60, and to celebrate that milestone, Deutsche Grammophon has produced a 13-CD survey from his 30 years of recordings with the company, ranging from Mozart to Giacomo Manzoni (born in 1932 and the youngest composer Pollini has recorded). Along with it, the label has released two new Pollini CDs of solo music by Robert Schumann. Pollini isn’t everyone’s kind of pianist, and these recordings are not to all tastes. But rare is the knowledgeable music lover who does not, at the very least, hold the Italian pianist in awe. By any reasonable standard, he is--and the records he makes are--legendary.

The usual objection to Pollini’s playing is that his Apollonian objectivity, his obsessive observance of a composer’s wishes, his persistent rationality flush emotion out of his performances. His detractors feel that he takes the Modernist sculptural idea too far and turns a living, changeable art into unyielding stone or steel; that he is that exceptional Italian without sensuality.

It is true that Pollini never gives anything less than an intensely considered performance. With a penetrating intellect, he is a perfectionist who focuses with almost frightening concentration on every musical detail. Empowered with a superman’s technique, he has the means with which to solve musical problems in any way he wishes, which only enhances his reputation for being analytical. Meanwhile, his reticence to give interviews--and on the exceptional occasions that he does, his refusal to discuss his personal life--makes some think him standoffish.

But none of this need imply that his playing lacks humanity or warmth. Just to watch Pollini briskly walk on stage, with sheepish smile, raring to go (he habitually downs a dozen cups of espresso before a performance), is to see a highly appealing, unpretentious performer. He is elegant in a way that seems inborn among the sophisticated Milanese, yet he may forget to comb his hair and also look endearingly frumpy.

Pollini seems to have arrived on the scene fully formed. His career was launched in 1960 when he took first place at the Frederic Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and the judges declared that the 18-year-old played better than any of them. A bonus CD in the “Pollini Edition” includes the first commercial release of his winning competition performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and the clean-textured, alert, exquisitely shaped, technically brilliant playing already displays Pollini’s hallmarks.

He went on to make a similar studio recording for EMI, but his perfectionism was so well ingrained that though the public was ready for him, he was not yet ready for it. Instead, he spent most of the ‘60s out of the limelight--practicing, expanding his repertory, exploring 20th century music, joining other intellectuals and artists in left-wing Italian political causes.

When Pollini did reemerge, he was a mature artist. In 1971, he made his first Deutsche Grammophon recording, which contained a spectacular performance of Stravinsky’s Three Movements from “Petrushka.” It caused a sensation when released the next year and still astounds today for its speed, precision and clarity.

That was followed by a Chopin disc, in which the Etudes sounded so perfectly formed that many of us felt we were hearing these cherished pieces for the first time. The Chopin recording cemented Pollini’s reputation as the most exciting pianist of his generation, and one of the most satisfying, illuminating and all-around impressive pianists of any generation.

The “Pollini Edition” is evidence that the pianist lived up to that promise. Throughout these recordings there is a remarkable consistency over a wide range of repertory and over three decades. The sound of the Chopin from 30 years ago and of his latest recordings is surprising similar. He is consistent in his choice of colleagues as well--concertos by Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Schoenberg and Bartok are all conducted by his close friend of 40 years, Claudio Abbado.

Still, changes inevitably occur in any musician, however objective he may try to be. In the latest edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Musicians, British critic David Fanning writes that in the late ‘80s, “the nervous intensity of [Pollini’s] playing began to show an increasing rigidity of phrasing and tendency to clip rhythms.” The set and new releases allow an opportunity to gauge that in recordings of Schumann over the years.

The bonus CD includes a performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Herbert von Karajan leading the Vienna Philharmonic taped during a concert at the 1974 Salzburg Festival. Fifteen years later, Pollini made a live recording of the work with Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic. There is a 28-year spread between Pollini’s first solo Schumann recording, the Fantasy, made in his favorite Munich hall in 1973, and the new recording of “Kreisleriana” made last year in the same venue. And yes, his playing has indeed become sharper-edged.

In the Karajan recording of the concerto, a young soloist appears with the world’s smoothest orchestra led by Mr. Smoothy himself at a festival run by the control-freak conductor. Pollini fits right in with impressively fleet, sterling playing polished to perfectly reflect the Karajan shine. Years later, with the more collegial Abbado in Berlin, Pollini takes a monumental approach; he and the orchestra act as equals. There is a new boldness, power, authority and magnificence in his playing for which “rigid” is far too rigid an adjective. The verve of the younger Pollini is replaced by a greater degree of richness, of wanting every note to stand for something. But the exhilarating Pollini virtuosity, the speed and surety of his fingers, remains.

Again, a similar contrast can be found between the early Schumann solo recordings and the latest. On first hearing, the new recording of “Kreisleriana” does not sound as supple as performances by other pianists. Pollini’s reveals a violence and harshness, as if stripping away the last shred of beguilement from his pianism. In fact, what he is stripping away is interpretive excess in a search for musical essence.

In doing so, he restores to “Kreisleriana” the character of the E.T.A. Hoffmann stories that inspired Schumann to write the work. The impatient, perfectionist pianist reflects the spiritualist German writer’s frustrations with humankind’s lack of imagination, which were underscored by a nervously intense composer. In Pollini’s hands, this music’s mysteries are not found on the surface.

That Pollini simply embodies the piano can be heard over and over again in these recordings. He brings severe fervor to Bartok’s piano concertos, and he exposes a rationalism so profound that it becomes transcendent in his playing of late Beethoven sonatas. Transcendent too is his explosive virtuosity, which makes Debussy’s Etudes and Boulez’s Second Sonata light up the skies. The concentrated long lines in his Schubert and Schoenberg become the epitome of lyricism. Pollini was the first and only pianist to inspire Luigi Nono to write for the piano, and “...sofferte onde serene...” for piano and tape is like taking a musical submarine into the depths of Pollini pianistic persona, a place of unfathomable wonder.

As much as Deutsche Grammophon’s Pollini overview has to offer, it actually might have provided more. The 12 discs of reissued recordings make satisfying, repackaged individual programs, yet it is hard to think that anyone who would invest in the complete set doesn’t already own many of them. The bonus disc of the early live Chopin and Schumann recordings is hardly a compensation. When the label gets around to releasing the discs individually at mid-price, however, they will be bargains.

Most disappointing is that the label has not paid tribute to the breadth of Pollini’s interests or repertory. His discography, wide as it is, still lacks the extremes of the music he plays in concert; there is no Bach, Stockhausen or Sciarrino. In recent years, he has curated venturesome series at the Salzburg Festival and Carnegie Hall, where Renaissance choral music might rub shoulders with new works by today’s Italian and Austrian composers. Live recordings of these concerts, which have included the likes of the Emerson Quartet, would be of great value.

And what about releasing on disc the lecture the pianist once gave at a Beethoven symposium sponsored by Carnegie Hall? Not only did Pollini prove more illuminating than any of the big-time academics on hand, he was also the most charming--a sly sense of humor is one of his secret weapons.

We live in a golden age of pianists that includes the hot-tempered Argerich, the poetic Murray Perahia, the vibrant Mitsuko Uchida, the boldly venturesome Marc-Andre-Hamelin, the profound Peter Serkin. Such young pianists as Arcadi Volodos and Marino Formenti, players who astonish with fingers, ideas, individuality and overwhelming charisma, give cause to jump for joy.

And yet Maurizio Pollini’s combination of gifts and devotion to musical ideals keeps him in a class of his own. What he builds is built to last.

*

Mark Swed is The Times’ classical music critic.