Grosses Festspielhaus
Chopin – Preludes, op.28
Debussy – Préludes, Book I
Rankings are absurd, but if
anyone were to have doubted the identity of our greatest living pianist, this
recital should have made the answer clear. The programme was wonderful:
supremely challenging, of course, but one which one might have expected some
other of our more thoughtful pianists to have essayed. Results were more than
wonderful, the first half offering a tonal conspectus of searing drama, without
a hint of didacticism, the second offering commentary and extension, sometimes
readily apparent, sometimes more oblique, upon the first, whilst always
remaining true to itself.
Chopin’s C major Prelude opening
the recital sounded less as an opening flourish than as the latest instalment
in a recital that might have been going on for hours: less creatio ex nihilo, then, than being plunged in medias res. That seemed to apply equally to work and performance,
between which it was in any case impossible to distinguish. From this outset,
Maurizio Pollini managed to combine a scale of utterance necessary for the
Grosses Festspielhaus with an intimacy that retained more than a trace of the
salon (albeit without the vapidity of much of its music). The integrity of the ‘Raindrop’
Prelude would be a case in point. It sounded as if a miniature Lisztian
symphonic poem: high Romanticism in the best sense. As Chopin traversed the
tonal system, so he seemed to traverse an entire world of expression. The A
minor Prelude, introverted, almost Schoenbergian, happened upon a new vista
with the pianist’s right hand: not superseding, but a new element, the
dialectical relationship between new, existing, and developing material
properly unstable. Likewise the left hand’s sad melody in the B minor Prelude
evoked a world we seemed both to know and yet not to know. Sentiment was
certainly never to be confused with sentimentality, as the minor mode Prelude
in between, that in E minor, asserted, ensuring that Chopin’s sadness was all
the greater. Pollini’s razor-like clarity extended not only to musical line but
also to harmonic direction. Meaningful fury, not a note wasted, characterised
such different pieces as those in F-sharp minor, G-sharp minor, and F minor. The
E major Prelude, bold, and public, attained its stature at least as much on
account of its placing, upon what had gone before, as its undeniable individuality;
much the same could be said of its C minor cousin, and how one felt the impact
of Chopin’s bass there! The G minor Prelude was revealed to be as complex and
as passionate as a Brahms Intermezzo. (If only Pollini were to play some of
those late Brahms works!) So too was the final Prelude in D minor, a daemonic
conclusion, which, despite equal temperament, testified to the very special
nature of that key, whether looking back to Mozart, or forward to Berg and
Schoenberg.
‘Danseuses de Delphes’ is a
very different opening gambit, and so it sounded, yet it emerged, intriguingly,
in its onward tread as a son of Chopin’s G minor Prelude, irresolution in more
than one sense marking Debussy’s very different path. Indeterminacy was, in ‘Voiles’,
raised to the status of a determining principle, although the piece was to
receive a few more turnings of that dialectical screw in Pollini’s performance.
Not that there was anything ‘dry’ to his performance, in which the Debussyan instrument
without hammers sounded less an aspiration, more a realised delight. ‘Sons’ and
‘parfums’ alike were made musical sense of in ‘Les Sons et les parfums tournent
dans l’air du soir’; I was set to wonder what Pollini’s Scriabin or Messiaen
might have to offer. (A great deal, I am sure, although I doubt, alas, that we
shall now ever find out.) ‘Les Collines d’Anacapri’ was more nervously
consistent than I can recall hearing, whether from Pollini or anyone else,
probably less ‘Spanish’ too, at least in a touristic sense, although, on the
other hand, musical connections to Ibéria
announced themselves freely. ‘Des pas sur la neige’ came across after that as
all the more powerful in its introverted mode of generation: ‘simple’ yet
deeply radical. Ensuing turbulence in ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ highlighted
both Chopinesque roots and Debussyan singularity. Kinship between ‘La Fille aux
cheveux de lin’ and the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude similarly registered, seemingly of
its own accord. The opening of ‘La Sérénade interrompue’ might have been from a
work by Bartók, albeit, if this may be imagined, a hammer-less Bartók,
presaging the radical, sometimes menacing whimsy of ‘La Danse de Puck’. In
between, ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ offered magical – and provocative – lack of
clarity between melody and harmony. The lance that Liszt had hurled into the
musical future appeared to land in the final ‘Minstrels’, the ghost of Mephisto
haunting, sardonically and yet certainly not without warmth.
Three encores followed. First
came the ‘Revolutionary’ Etude, very much in the vein of the most furious of
the Preludes, yet resolutely ‘Classical’ in direct, unbending presentation of
the argument. The G minor Ballade was as fluid as the Etude was strict, the dynamism
of Chopin’s form speaking just as clearly. What powerful drama, meaning emerging
from within rather than being ‘applied’ from without! Finally, the Berceuse,
Pollini’s performance achieving a Nono-like marriage between ‘aquatic’
invitation and steely, generative turbulence. It sounded so simple and yet so
infinitely complex, ‘so alt – und war doch so neu!’ Chopin playing, indeed any
musical performance, really does not get better than this.
