Maurizio Pollini (5 January 1942 – 23 March 2024) was an Italian pianist and conductor. He was known for performances of Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and the Second Viennese School, among others. He championed works by contemporary composers, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Benjamin, Roberto Carnevale, Gianluca Cascioli and Bruno Maderna. Several compositions were written for him, including Luigi Nono's ... sofferte onde serene ..., Giacomo Manzoni's Masse: omaggio a Edgard Varèse, and Salvatore Sciarrino's Fifth Sonata. As a conductor he was instrumental in the Rossini revival at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, conducting La donna del lago from a new critical edition in 1981. He also conducted from the keyboard.

Pollini was also a left-wing activist in the 1960s and 1970s, and he remained politically engaged in later life. He maintained some separation between these ideals and his music.

Life and career

1942–early 1960s: Upbringing, studies, and competitions

Pollini was born in Milan in 1942. His father Gino Pollini was an amateur violinist. Gino was among the first architects of Gruppo 7 to bring modern architecture to Italy in the 1930s. His mother Renata Melotti had trained as a pianist and singer. She was a sister of the Italian sculptor Fausto Melotti.

<!--Pollini started learning the piano at age five, gave his first recital at age 11 and played Chopin's complete Études in concert in 1956. In his early years, he looked up to pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Walter Gieseking, as well as to conductors Arturo Toscanini and Dimitri Mitropoulos. while probably true it needs a ref-->

Pollini studied piano with notable local teacher Carlo Lonati from age seven. Lonati allowed him to play what he loved, he remembered. When Lonati died, his student Carlo Vidusso became Pollini's next teacher. Pollini remained Vidusso's student from age 13 to 18. Vidusso trained Pollini strictly at the Milan Conservatory, preparing him to compete. Pollini also studied composition and conducting there.

He made his debut in Milan at the age of 15, performing a selection of Chopin's Etudes. In 1957 he took second prize, after Martha Argerich, in the Geneva International Music Competition at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève. He won both the 1959 International Ettore Pozzoli Piano Competition in Seregno and the 1960 sixth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw at the age of 18. He was the youngest of 89 entrants and the first non-Slav to win in the history of the competition. He selected among the most formidable of the possible etudes the Op. 10, No. 10, Op. 25, No. 11, and Op. 10, No. 1, which assessed as qualifying Pollini for "the madhouse or victory". Arthur Rubinstein, leading the jury, declared "that boy can play the piano better than any of us".

After these successes, Pollini did not perform for one year. He limited his concertizing in the 1960s to study, broadening his musical experience and expanding his pianistic repertoire. This led to erroneous rumors that he had become a recluse. He taped performances of Chopin's Etudes and recorded Chopin's First Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Paul Kletzki for EMI. He had a "crisis of confidence", as Peter Andry described it, when the Philharmonia offered him a concert series.

He studied with pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli for six months in the early 1960s. Michelangeli's repertoire was select and polished by rigorous practice. Pollini obtained "a precise technique and emotional restraint". Some expressed concern that Michelangeli's influence led to Pollini's style becoming "mannered and cold"<!-- His concern, he said, was to express the composer as accurately as possible, not to convey his own emotions. can't find it, I tried, - it's also quite a common statement – this whole little paragraph doesn't even belong to recordings--> John Rockwell summarized Pollini's "hard‐edged and modern" style as one of "coolness, intensity and virtuosity", noting his tonal control and "sheer dexterity".

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Pollini gave recitals and appeared with orchestras in Europe, the United States, and the Far East. His American debut was in 1968 at Carnegie Hall in New York. He first toured Japan in 1974. Once wary of becoming pigeonholed as a specialist, especially of Chopin, he had "clearly avoided that tag" by the 1970s, Rockwell noted while surveying Pollini's discography in its then range from Mozart to Nono.

Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, Pollini was active as a left-wing musician. His collaborative work with Claudio Abbado and Luigi Nono was informed by their shared ideals. He was also musically and politically associated with Giacomo Manzoni and . Pollini worked with Nono in such works as Como una ola de fuerza y luz (1972), which mourned the death of Luciano Cruz, a leader of the Revolutionary Left Movement in Chile. He performed with Abbado at La Scala in Milan in concerts for students and workers, aiming to build a public among them in the spirit that art should be for everybody.

thumb|left|Pollini in 1975

Nono wrote ... sofferte onde serene ... for Pollini in 1974–1976. It was a meditative soloistic piece on recent losses among their family and friends. Pollini's 1977 live performance was amplified against a magnetic tape recording of himself. Nono thereby explored pianistic envelope ("Sometimes I cut off the attack, so that the sound manifests as a resonance without time") and the sounds of Venice (where "one constantly hears the sound of bells"). Nono cited an attraction to Pollini's technique in particular. He sought to amplify and project details of Pollini's sound ("certain nuances of his touch"). They worked together for three days in the recording studio at Radio Milano with audio engineer Marino Zuccheri. The work remained in Pollini's repertoire; he later played it in London at the Southbank Centre's "Fragments of Venice" festival (2007) and in Salzburg (2019).

Pollini took up Boulez's "weighty" Second Sonata in the 1970s. In 1977, he played Bartok's Second Concerto under Boulez with the New York Philharmonic. Harold C. Schonberg wrote that he "had not heard a stronger account".

1980s–2024: Later career and conducting

Pollini also conducted when he played piano concertos such as Mozart's. Celebrating J. S. Bach's 1985 tricentenary, he performed The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I. He later recorded it in 2009.

In 1987, he received the Vienna Philharmonic's Honorary Ring while playing Beethoven's piano concertos with them in New York conducted by Abbado. In 1993–1994, he played his first complete Beethoven sonata cycle in Berlin and Munich. He continued this in New York City, at La Scala, in London, Paris and Vienna. He financed these projects with the prize money of the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. He toured Central Europe in 2014, performing at the Salzburg Festival and debuting at the Rheingau Musik Festival with Chopin's Preludes and Debussy's Preludes, Book I, in the Kurhaus Wiesbaden. In 2022, his 80th birthday recital received a four-star award in The Times.

Private life

In 1968 Pollini married Maria Elisabetta Marzotto, known as Marilisa, a pianist from a Milanese family. Maurizio Pollini died on 23 March 2024, aged 82. His son is a pianist and a conductor.

Recordings

Pollini's first recordings for Deutsche Grammophon (DG) in 1971 included Stravinsky's Trois mouvements de Petrouchka and Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata. They are considered landmarks of twentieth-century piano discography. He recorded Chopin's Etudes, Opp. 10 and 25 in 1972 In 2014, he recorded the entire Beethoven piano sonatas cycle. DG celebrated Pollini's 60th birthday (2002) with a 13-CD commemorative edition and his 75th (2017) with a complete 58-CD edition.

Awards and recognition

In 1996, Pollini received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. In 2001, his recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations won the Diapason d'Or. In 2007, Pollini received the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) for his Deutsche Grammophon recording of Chopin's Nocturnes. and entered the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012.

Notes

References

Cited sources

Further reading

  • Maurizio Pollini interview, (23 October 1997)