Maurizio Pollini, innovative pianist, 82
Maurizio Pollini, a celebrated Italian pianist whose playing combined intellectual rigor with technical mastery, died March 23 at age 82.
The death was announced by Milan’s La Scala opera house, where Pollini performed frequently. No further details were immediately made public. He lived in Milan.
During a flourishing international career spanning more than six decades, Pollini was steadily ranked among those rare musicians to whom other musicians paid close attention. Pianists regularly brought along printed scores of music by Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin to Pollini’s concerts and then listened to what he had found in works they had hitherto thought familiar.
His repertory expanded beyond the standard classics, not only through early 20th century masterpieces by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern but on to leading postwar modernists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, who were only a decade or two older than he was.
Pollini made the most difficult music thrilling and immediate. A 1983 recital at New York’s Lincoln Center began with Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations (hardly easy music, despite the composer’s familiarity). But most of the program’s second half was devoted to Stockhausen’s “Klavierstuck X” (1961) — 25 minutes of crashing dissonances, darting runs and roaring bass sonorities, partly played with fingerless gloves to keep from damaging the pianist’s hands — as challenging as any bravura, 19th-century virtuoso display piece by Liszt.
When it was over, the audience rushed toward the stage as though Pollini had been a long-retired rock star, wanting more and stamping and shouting for several minutes.
Nobody doubted Pollini’s mastery of the keyboard, which was all but absolute. During his best years before the public, he probably played fewer finger slips than any other pianist. But there were listeners who found his interpretations cold and hard. Harold C. Schonberg, chief music critic for the New York Times, summed up the argument against Pollini concisely in his book “The Great Pianists”: “He can do anything he wants to do at the piano, and he does everything much the same way — objectively, standing outside the music, refusing any fervent emotional commitment, just producing beautiful, well-organized, impersonal sounds.”
Harris Goldsmith, another critic who made a specialty of writing about the piano, called Pollini’s playing “almost entirely geometric” and said he was “a musical counterpart of Mondrian.”
For other listeners, Pollini was simply one of the greatest artists of his time, a musician who offered pristinely clear, clean, linear and proportionate playing, yet found fresh and unexpected beauties in anything he took on. Los Angeles Times classical music critic Daniel Cariaga once wrote that Pollini “walks onto the stage as one entering a church. Such an approach not only tends to remind us of the basic nature of art; it also makes other practitioners in the field seem frivolous.”
In 1980, he won the Grammy Award in the category best classical performance — instrumental soloist or soloists (with orchestra) for “Bartók: Piano Cons. Nos. 1 & 2” with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2007, he won another Grammy, for instrumental soloist performance (without orchestra), for his album of Chopin Nocturnes. In late 2016, Deutsche Grammophon brought out a set of 55 discs and DVDs to commemorate Pollini’s 75th birthday.