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| (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) |
Maurizio Pollini was a guiding light of my musical life: which is to say, he and his music-making were with me from the moment in my teens when I became seriously interested in music. More, composers and performers alike, are gone now than remain with us; I shall not tempt fate by naming those who are left. One of my very first cassette purchases – it may even have been the first – was his recording of Mozart’s Piano Concertos nos 19 and 23 with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. I love it more than I can say. Mozart’s music requires but one thing: perfection. Perfection it receives in what, I suspect, will always be one of my Desert Island Discs.
In my first London concert, a Prom for which I took the bus up to London and back to Sheffield for a birthday treat with a friend, Pollini was the soloist, again in Mozart, this time in the C minor Concerto, no.24. It was also my first live Schoenberg and Stravinsky (the First Chamber Symphony and Pulcinella, with the CBSO conducted by Simon Rattle). And then, when, as a student, I bought my first ticket for a London piano recital, now taking a return rail journey from Cambridge, it was Pollini: in his beloved Chopin, which by now I knew well enough from recordings, above all those ever-astounding Études and Préludes. What it was, though, to hear him live, as I sat on the Royal Festival Hall stage, incredibly close to the master and his instrument. The technique was of course dazzling, Pollini’s pristine perfection taken by duller souls for a lack of depth or some other such nonsense. I read review after review in which the musical equivalent of the nouveaux riches would lament his technical ability, failing to realise that, like that of any great musician, it was in the service of a musical performance that would have been nothing without it. By now, of course, I knew among other recorded performances that simply astounding DG Originals CD, bringing together two original recordings, of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Webern, and Boulez.
Prokofiev and Stravinsky were no longer in his repertory by the time I heard him, but both the Webern (Variations, op.27) and Boulez (Piano Sonata no.2) I would hear live more than once. One of those occasions combined the two, in a 2006 recital at the Salzburg Festival. It had been advertised, somewhat surprisingly, as an all-Mozart recital, but then it was the composer’s 250th anniversary year. I had longed to hear him in solo Mozart – none of which, so far as I am aware, he recorded – and so I did, in the first half. The second half of the programme, though, he changed to Webern and Boulez, initiating an exodus not only at the interval, not only after the Webern, but unforgivably, during the ice, fire, and elements unknown to this universe of the Boulez. I might have thought I could not admire him any more than I did already; now, however, I did.
There was so much else, of course, not least the music of Luigi Nono, some of which, quite simply, would not have existed had it not been for his friendship with Pollini (and Claudio Abbado). …sofferte onde serene… I knew it a little from his recording, but to hear it live in London at the Southbank Centre’s courageous ‘Fragments of Venice’ festival in 2007, was truly to hear it for the first time. The last time I did so, at Salzburg in 2019, it was like welcoming an old friend, albeit one who could shock and surprise, as well as seduce, as brilliantly as you could imagine—and then some.
It was an important concert for me in
another way too: the first time I had written a programme
essay for a Pollini concert. I have no idea whether he would have read it;
I am sure he had 1001 better things to do with his time, but a little part of me
hopes that he might have done and not found it hopelessly inadequate. (It is perhaps
best that I shall never know.) I should like, if I may, to quote the Nono part
of that note, not for any intrinsic worth, but simply because in some way, that
felt for me to be a moment at which I came closer to Pollini.
Such serenity provides both starting point
and goal for the poetic idea of Luigi Nono’s 1976 …sofferte onde serene…. The waves are Venetian, so too is the
tolling of bells, almost as if transposed from the Vienna of Schoenberg’s op.19
no.6 [heard immediately before]. Heard, felt and answered from Nono’s home on
the Giudecca, those sounds seem, as with Schoenberg’s, not only to say farewell
to earlier, angrier compositional and aesthetic tendencies – tendencies that
had culminated for Nono in the high-watermark of his politically committed art,
the opera Al gran sole carico d’amore
– but also to sustain them in distillation, in further development. ‘I could
say’, Nono remarked, ‘as Schoenberg did, that, at the conclusion of each work,
I wish more than ever to breathe the air of new planets’. It also continued
Nono’s artistic collaboration with Pollini, initiated by Como un ola de fuerza y luz (1971–2), although the two leftist
musicians had known each other since the mid-1960s. …sofferte onde serene… displayed, as Nono averred, a reduction in
the multiplicity of musical material: a new path taken following a period of
compositional silence.
That apparent simplification in itself
inspired further ‘waves’ – lagoonal and sonic – in collaboration enshrined at
the work’s heart, Nono’s purpose amplification rather than counterpoint.
Dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini, it operates on two acoustic planes:
Pollini live and on tape. They merge, realized in the air through artistry of
sound direction – first Nono himself; tonight, André Richard. Vibrations,
shadows and resonances sustain and transform memories of loss suffered by
composer and pianist. Ghosts of other sounds and works in Pollini’s repertoire
are honoured and transformed. (Late, Venetian-themed works by Liszt, La lugubre gondola and R.W. Venezia, were performed at the 1977 premiere.) The moment of Schoenbergian
hyper-expressivity – sometimes stark, sometimes on the edge of audibility,
sometimes even falling into silence –compels active listening. Nono’s politics
have not drowned; they are revealed anew in the waters. So as not to confuse
the political ‘provocations’ for earlier works with their substance, we must
listen, suffering to break musical silence as the composer did, inspired by his
pianist and friend as much as by the instrument. Counterpoint and conflict seem
conspicuous by their absence, certainly by comparison to Nono’s preceding
works. Whether we feel that absence as an integral aspect of the work is an
impossible yet necessary question.
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| Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono |
I could list fond memories aplenty: from the time when Pollini played those Schoenberg op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces as a single encore, one of four, to the five-concert ‘Pollini Project’ series at the Festival Hall, which took us literally from Bach to Boulez. A good number of them will be found on my blog in any case, under the Maurizio Pollini tag. There was the Bauhaus, crystalline surface-perfection of his recording of the op.25 Schoenberg Suite for piano, teeming with energy below, and the Orphic taming of the Furies in the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with Böhm. There were Stockhausen and Sciarrino, Schubert, and Schumann. I should at least mention the transition, or so it seemed, to a ‘late Pollini’, in which the technique was not quite so unwaveringly infallible as once it had been, though it certainly remained (until very late) present. Many felt a greater depth, almost as compensation. I know what they meant, but I think it was an illusion: the same old illusion that meant, dazzled and in some curious cases repelled by technique, they had never heard that depth in the first place now led them to hear it more strongly. There was, though, an instructive and touching element of humanity to the ageing process that came to us listeners as much as to the performer.
Amidst such
reminiscences, the communist Pollini’s unwavering political commitment should
not be forgotten. It informed his performance as much as it did the
compositional work of Nono—or Beethoven. Advocacy of Nono’s music took him and as Abbado beyond the concert hall and the opera
house to the car factories of northern Italy. It would have been easier to
glory in the world of ‘star performers’, but that was clearly never somewhere
Pollini, however fêted, was ever at home. In many ways, his music-making was
always a product of the ‘Years of Lead’ in which fascism, openly backed by much
of ‘the West’, threatened to occupy much of Europe once again. Speaking in Bettina Erhardt’s wonderful film on
Nono, A Trail on the Water, made after Nono’s death, Pollini recalled
one incident in particular:
There was a lot of tension in the air. We have to remember the situation in Italy back then. People were even talking about a possible Fascist coup. There was the example of the colonels in Greece. The fear of a turn towards authoritarianism was serious. After the massacre on the Piazza Fontana in Milan and the bombs, we took it all the more seriously. I think it was the reaction of the whole country that kept it from happening. Back then, I once read, or rather tried to read, a declaration against a hideous atrocity in the Vietnam War when the United States bombed Hanoi and Hai Phong. Several Italian musicians had signed the declaration: Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono, [Giacomo] Manzoni and the Quartetto Italiano, as well as Goffredo Petrassi, Luigi Dallapiccola. Contrary to all my expectations, at the mere sound of the word ‘Vietnam’, the audience exploded in a kind of collective delirium, which made it impossible to continue my recital. I made several attempts to read this short statement. This was interrupted by the arrival of the police. Eventually the piano was closed and that was that.
He spoke
at the protests against Berlusconi almost half a century later too. Maurizio
Pollini was a great pianist, a great musician, but above all a great man, a
great human being. However unfashionable it may be to say so, for me that shows
in his music-making. In recorded form, as in our memories, that will live
forever. And we shall be able to tell those younger than ourselves: ‘I heard
Pollini.’
