Royal Festival Hall
Chopin – Two Nocturnes,
Op.27; Ballade no.3 in A-flat major, op.47; Ballade no.4 in F minor, op.52;
Berceuse in D-flat major, op.57; Scherzo no.1 in B minor, op.20
Debussy – Préludes, Book II
Debussy – Préludes, Book II
Maurizio Pollini (piano)
It was to hear Maurizio Pollini play
Chopin that I paid my first visit to the Royal Festival Hall. Then, I was one
of the students on stage, benefiting from the £5 tickets available to do so. It
seemed fitting, therefore, that my last visit for some time at least should be
for the same. (This time next week, I should be in the air to Berlin, where I
shall be based for the rest of 2017, taking a much needed break from an
increasingly vicious, racist country.) On the present occasion, I treated
myself – well, used up my remaining credit vouchers – to a ticket in the
Stalls.
Swings and roundabouts, perhaps, in
that respect; I could see less well, yet perhaps hear better. More importantly,
Pollini’s artistry, whilst now in some ways very different in its nature, or
rather in its surface nature, remains undimmed. It is as intelligent, as
probing, as radical as ever: if anything, still more so. The nonsense one used
to hear about Pollini – ‘technically perfect, but where is the emotion?’ as if
the two were somehow diametrically opposed – has now been replaced by a bizarre
insistence, mostly from the very same people, that the occasional technical
slip invalidates everything else he does. Clearly they have other reasons –
often political: you will often find a reference to his socialism – for what
they say. People are perfectly at liberty to like or to dislike Pollini’s
playing; let them be honest, however, about why.
The pair of Nocturnes, op.27, with
which Pollini opened the recital – I once heard one of his detractors claim,
bizarrely, ‘no one wants to hear two Nocturnes in a row’ – emerged more
strongly as a pair than I can previously recall. That is not to say that their
differences were ignored, far from it, but that an almost Lisztian
transformative impulse, mixed – looking ahead – with a quasi-‘impressionist’
sense of watery depths, somehow both clear and impenetrable, bound and freed
what might never have been ‘intended’ to be bound in the first place. For
everything one hears about Chopin’s inspiration in Bellini, what struck me
here, not for the first time, was that what is of far greater interest in
Chopin is how he differs, how he transforms a stiff melodic model and renders
it endlessly flexible, of endless harmonic fascination. Pollini’s emphasis upon
a particular note, especially in the C-sharp minor Nocturne, had not only the
piece, but seemingly the entire harmonic universe, spinning upon its axis. Generalisations
about structure seemed quite beside the point; form – a more dynamic
conception, perhaps, than structure – was recreated before our ears, Chopin’s lines
playing out with simultaneous spontaneity and inevitability.
The two Ballades followed another
interesting tonal progression: no accident that, I am sure. Where we had gone
from tonic minor to major, now we went from major to relative minor. The
recreative – formal, one might say, in the sense outlined above – was powerful
throughout, seemingly taking in, just as in one of the pianist’s traversals
of the twenty-four Preludes, that entire tonal universe, yet never
bureaucratically, always, to use a properly Romantic word, ‘poetically’. The
motivic working seemed as tightly knit, endlessly generative, as that of, say,
Schoenberg. It is quite different, of course, but that does not make it any
sense inferior. A lovely, almost Venetian account of the Berceuse, which yet
more than hinted at turbulence beneath as well as upon the surface, led to a B
minor Scherzo that seemed to strive, and indeed to achieve, veritably Lisztian
heights and depths. This, as ever with Chopin, was a Scherzo that did not jest,
and yet a kinship of spirit, as opposed to method, with Beethoven more than
once suggested itself.
I had only heard Pollini play the first
book of Debussy Préludes in concert
before (whether complete
or in a selection). His way with the second was quite different from my
memories, indeed quite different from anything I might have expected. Although
the twelve pieces seemed quite ‘naturally’ – what artifice, even feux thereof, there will always be in
that – to form a whole, there was no evident attempt to make them do so, no
particular æsthetic, whether ‘modernist’, ‘impressionist’, or anything else.
Connections again suggested themselves; perhaps I was just in that sort of
mood. We started with a post-Lisztian Debussy, the Liszt of old age, not only Nuages gris but harsher, darker, more
Mephistophelian tendencies leading us through Brouillards, with very open-ended non-conclusion, into Feuilles mortes. (Come to think of that,
is that not a rather Lisztian title and idea?) Rhythms proved suggestive – not only
pictorially, indeed not even especially pictorially, but of musical process,
musical possibility. We can all hear the habenera without having it underlined;
Debussy is not Bizet, nor indeed Ravel. (I do wish, though, that Pollini had
played some of the latter’s music. Imagine a Gaspard or a Miroirs!)
Likewise the cakewalk. ‘God save the King’ was less deconstructed, as one might
have expected, than permitted to decompose – and re-compose. And there was – I am
afraid I cannot for the life of me remember where – a strong suggestion of Mahlerian,
even Schoenbergian waltzing somewhere else, such as I cannot recall ever having
heard before. Se vuol ballare, Signor Pollini? Les tierces alternées proved as true a study in its nominated
interval as I can recall, Webern but a stone’s throw away, if that. And it was
to Liszt, to nineteenth-century pyrotechnics, that we returned in those closing
Feux d’artifice.
As ever with Pollini, there was at
least as much to enjoy, and to think about, in the encores. Typically generous,
he gave us La cathédrale engloutie,
hieratic yet subtle, and two more Chopin pieces, the C-sharp minor Scherzo and
the G minor Ballade, both burrowing deep beneath the surface, harmonic rhythm
very much their guiding principle. Se
vuol ballare…? I could have danced all night.