Maurizio Pollini BEETHOVEN The Last Three Sonatas Opp. 109 - 111

                                        THE LAST THREE SONATAS OPP. 109 - 111

Maurizio Pollini CHOPIN

Maurizio Pollini – Chopin comprises four works written between 1843 and 1844, including the haunting Berceuse in D flat major Op.57 and the four-movement Piano Sonata in B minor Op.58, a proud Polish musician’s spectacular creative response to the dominant legacy of German keyboard sonatas. The programme opens with Chopin’s two Nocturnes Op.55 and three Mazurkas Op.56, before moving to the composer’s Opp.57 and 58 scores, with each piece presented in the order of its publication. Pollini here trains the spotlight on the infinite breadth of Chopin’s melodic invention. As the pianist points out, Chopin always favoured variety over uniformity when constructing his own concert programmes.

Pollini’s choice of compositions from a narrow window in time allowed him to revisit works already in his Deutsche Grammophon catalogue and to add the Op.56 Mazurkas to his Yellow Label discography. Maurizio Pollini – Chopin preserves the fruits of a lifelong process of study and experience gained since the pianist began exploring Chopin’s art in the early 1950s. As he once told the New York Times, “The music of Chopin has been with me my entire life, since … I was a boy. My love for [it] has become greater and greater for years.”

For Maurizio Pollini, Chopin’s power lies in his capacity to express profound emotions in music of the utmost clarity and extraordinary beauty. “Chopin is an innately seductive composer,” he observes. “But there is an incredible depth to Chopin, and this depth should come, finally, in performance of him. What was extraordinary about him is that he was able to achieve universality. It is amazing that music so completely personal is able to conquer everybody.” Interviewed by BBC Radio 3 soon after his 75th birthday, the pianist suggested that Chopin wrote for the piano in a more beautiful way than any other composer and that there was a “touch of magic” about his music. “That magic is difficult to explain,” he noted, “but the balance between the different registers of the piano [allows] the music to sing wonderfully … He’s loved in all the world; everybody likes him.”

Maurizio Pollini DEBUSSY Preludes II

Maurizio Pollini recorded Preludes I for Deutsche Grammophon in 1998, his passion for Debussy having developed in the 1980s, the natural outcome of his intellectual curiosity and feeling for the piano’s infinite range of tonal colours and textures. It also flowed from his lifelong experience of performing Chopin, whose music Debussy worshipped and, in later years, turned to for inspiration.

In an interview with BBC Radio 3, first broadcast in February 2017 to celebrate his 75th birthday, Pollini declared that he is unable to live without music. “Every day [it] is an enormous [piece of] luck that I can sit at the piano and practise,” he observed, “because I have a relationship with wonderful pieces of music. This is something absolutely special. I play only pieces that I would be happy to play in every moment of my life.”

Debussy’s Préludes clearly count among those life-enhancing works. Pollini programmed the complete second book in company with music by Chopin for a series of recitals throughout 2016 and 2017, including performances in Munich, Tokyo, Milan, Cologne, London, Berlin, Paris and Vienna, and at the Lucerne and Salzburg festivals. “A magical set delivered with 360-degree vision,” noted the Evening Standard following his recital at London’s Royal Festival Hall last February. “Pollini’s Debussy has both poetry and muscle.” His recording of the second book will be released worldwide by DG on 16 February 2018.

Debussy, himself a fine pianist and visionary interpreter of Chopin’s music, began work on his second book of Préludes in late 1910 and the twelve-piece collection was published in early 1913. It contains some of the most extraordinary of his mature works, notable for their radically innovative piano writing and for the new keyboard soundworlds they reveal. From the tranquillity of Feuilles mortes to the explosive virtuosity of Feux d’artifice, via the watery evocations of Ondine and the humour of Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C., the variety and originality of these pieces never cease to amaze.

Unlike Chopin’s cycle of two dozen Preludes Op.28, Debussy’s book forms a sequence of musical impressions unrelated by key, and yet it evokes the infinite subtleties of the older composer’s piano writing. “Debussy had a great admiration for Chopin,” notes Pollini. “Both Debussy and Ravel were true followers of Chopin. They liked his music very much; they understood his greatness.”

Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Debussy experienced a prolonged creative block. He rediscovered his desire to compose after his friend and publisher Jacques Durand commissioned him to edit Chopin’s piano works, a project prompted by the exclusion of German editions from the French marketplace. “Chopin invigorated Debussy,” observed Marcel Dietschy in his biography of Debussy, “causing him to move the war back from the foreground of his concerns, and to summon up the slightly melancholy but consoling countenance of Music.”

En blanc et noir, composed in the summer of 1915, marked his return to composition and indeed the beginning of a new surge of creative activity in his final years. The three-movement work, inspired by the dark-hued “caprices” of Goya, captures the intense atmosphere of wartime France, rocked by recent news of the Germans’ first use of chlorine gas as a frontline weapon and the sinking of the Lusitania. Its middle movement, dedicated to a relative of Durand’s recently killed in action, pitches the Lutheran choral Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott against a version of the Marseillaise to raise doubts about the wisdom of national conflict.

Pollini is joined for En blanc et noir by his son, pianist, conductor and composer Daniele Pollini, here making his debut on Deutsche Grammophon. It is also the first time father and son have recorded together. “It was a great joy of course for me to record En blanc et noir with my son,” comments Maurizio Pollini. “We both took enormous pleasure in exploring the rich layers of colour and association that are woven into its three movements. Debussy, an outstanding pianist, understood that there are no limits to the possibilities of sound and expression on the piano – as illustrated to perfection in this, one of his late masterpieces.” (Deutsche Grammophon)

Maurizio Pollini CHOPIN Late Works Opp. 59 - 64

Chopin has remained one of the staples of Maurizio Pollini’s career both on record and in the concert hall for more than half a century. Since completing his recordings of most of the major works (only the mazurkas were not covered comprehensively), his most recent Chopin discs have returned to parts of that repertory to explore it chronologically. After collections devoted to works with opus numbers in the 20s and 30s, the latest focuses on the last pieces from Opp 59 to 64. There’s the Barcarolle and the Polonaise-Fantaisie, together with six mazurkas, two nocturnes and three waltzes, and the unfinished F minor Mazurka Op 68 no 3 added as an epilogue.

It’s easy to understand why Pollini should have been drawn back to these late pieces, with their harmonic daring and structural subtleties. He gives a fascinating account of the Barcarolle, austere and detached, but also intensely focused, though the Polonaise-Fantaisie, one of Chopin’s supreme achievements, disappoints; there’s none of the rhythmic drive Pollini once brought to it, as if now he is too wrapped up in its formal innovations. For all its passing beauties, there’s a sense throughout the disc that he’s more concerned with what he is still discovering in the music than in communicating to a larger audience; it often tells us more about him than it does about Chopin. (The Guardian)

PIERRE BOULEZ (1925 -2016) Complete Works

More than anyone else’s, Pierre Boulez’s oeuvre has not known completion and never will. Doubtless like so many creators – and not the least important –, he undertakes projects that, without any particular explanation, he will not follow up on. In the ‘unfinished’ category, for instance, appears a score he had planned to write for Les Percussions de Strasbourg, of which we are mentioning the idea only for the record. But in an approach of which there are few equivalents in the history of music, Pierre Boulez considers each of his works like the exploitation of a material, from which arise, in the course of an unpredictable but carefully controlled proliferation of new compositions or, more precisely, new versions of a composition that, in the final analysis, and for a given, immeasurable time, will have been only the kernel of the final piece. This is less a matter of alterations, expressing doubts or regrets, reactions that are hardly Boulezian, than the pursuit of work that, even if resulting in public performances (and such has often been the case), preserves its potentialities, so many stages before – the material deemed exhausted – the recognition of paternity of a definitive piece at last.

The present set is therefore itself testimony to a particular compositional process, the inventory of a body in the process of edification, in which certain, perfectly closed opuses are inscribed, and at the highest level, in the repertoire of contemporary musical creation whereas others, already noticed by commentators, are relegated to a sort of antechamber, the exploration of which requires the greatest patience.

This set also gives the idea of a shattered chronology, unlike the classic catalogue of a musician organizing the various pieces in his development one after another. Examples abound: thus Livre pour quatuor, for which Pierre Boulez imagined the succession of six movements back in 1948. A first, partial performance took place in 1955, and then, in this year 2012, he composed one of the missing movements. Detachable pages, in a way, for which Boulez took Mallarmé as a model. Consequently, the usage of this set, work by work in the hopes of detecting an itinerary, is totally utopian, except that the Boulezian corpus, albeit manifold, is homogeneous in its references, coherent through its different models, also progressive, from the rigours of an initial post-Webernian period up to the flexibility – fantasy? – of writing that is no less precise but somehow liberated. 

Missing links? Boulez wants to turn over only finished works or parts of works to the public. The programme of this set reflects the Boulezian corpus as ‘work in progress’. 

Finally, the recordings, chosen in agreement with the, composer attest to a real-time interpretation, if we might say so. Foundations of a tradition on which future generations will be able to nurture themselves without being condemned, for all that, to strict observance, which would contravene all that the Boulezian philosophy has taught us. The composer provides the example; his practice of conducting, his frequenting classical composers, his thinking about his own approach, the (relative) flexibility of his own scores, and the abilities of a new generation of performers commit him to new perspectives; beyond the word-by- word of the notes: more flexibility, differentiation in sound and clarity. The confrontation of the two recordings of Le Marteau sans maître proposed in this set, recordings made some forty years apart, supply the proof. In this area, nothing is definitive. But now, in addition to the pleasure of listening, knowledge of such period documents is particularly enlightening. It stimulates the listener’s thinking as much as the commentator’s and indicates fruitful paths to performers that simple faithfulness to a tradition would be unable to satisfy. 

‘Every work is ambiguous: attached to the past, oriented towards the future. What is important to me,’ says Boulez, ‘is its current contribution.’ A limited, but nonetheless demanding, ambition. (Claude Samuel)
CD 1 - 3 / CD 4 - 6 / CD 7 - 9 / CD 10 - 13

Pollini BEETHOVEN Sonatas Opp. 7 - 14 - 22

Maurizio Pollini began to record his cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas for Deutsche Grammophon in 1975, and he's only now nearing its completion. This collection of early works is the penultimate instalment; like most of its predecessors, they are studio recordings made in Lucerne and Munich last year, and like many of Pollini's recent discs and live performances, a curious mix of the magisterial and the severe. The two tendencies co-exist in the biggest of the sonatas here, the E flat Op 7, where passages of fabulous clarity and poise are punctuated with explosive chords that seem out of scale in early Beethoven, while parts of Op 22 in B flat are curiously abrupt too. But sometimes the overbearing element can vanish altogether, as it does in Pollini's delicate, quicksilver account of the first of the Op 14 pair, in G major. No one who has followed this cycle will think twice about hearing this latest batch of performances; those who might want to explore Beethoven sonatas for the first time should look elsewhere. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian, Thursday 7 November 2013)

Maurizio Pollini 20th CENTURY

Maurizio Pollini was born in Milan on 5 January 1942. His father was the famous architect Gino Pollini, one of the leading representatives of Italian rationalism and also an expert violinist. His mother, Renata Melotti, studied piano and singing and was the sister of the well-known sculptor Fausto Melotti, who had a lasting influence on the young Pollini. In 1948 Maurizio Pollini received his first piano lessons from Carlo Lonati. From 1955 until 1959 he continued his studies with Carlo Vidusso and in 1958 he began to study composition with Bruno Bettinelli. In 1960 he was awarded first prize at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw and appeared at La Scala playing Chopin’s First Piano Concerto under Celibidache. Since then Pollini has become one of the most admired and respected pianists of our time and has appeared all over the world with leading orchestras and conductors. He is particularly renowned for his innovative concert programmes which champion works by contemporary composers and contrasts these with those of the Classical and Romantic eras. An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist for four decades, his recordings have won innumerable awards, including Gramophone and Echo Awards, Diapason d’or, Record Academy Prize, Tokyo, and Stella d’oro as well as two Grammys.

 

More than any other leading pianist of the second half of the 20th century, Maurizio Pollini has made a point of championing radical new music. One of his principal aims in life has been to introduce new audiences to works by Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen and Sciarrino. Passionately opposed to the idea that art is a meditative medium conducive to rapt contemplation, he prefers to offer his audiences the sort of programmes whose fare is regarded by many as unpalatable or at least as taxing. The first new work he performed was Giorgio Federico Ghedini's masterly Fantasia for piano and strings, which he premiered at La Scala, Milan, on 11 October 1958 under the direction of Thomas Schippers. During the following decades he made a name for himself as a technically impeccable performer with rare powers of objective analysis and a remarkably cultured tone in a repertory extending from Bach, Beethoven and the Romantics to the most modern works. Since the 1990s he has appeared at every major music festival performing programmes of new works that he himself has planned in the form of special projects. Among the awards he has received in consequence are the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.

From the outset of his recording career, Maurizio Pollini has championed modern music - in benchmark accounts of Bartok, Boulez, Manzoni, Nono, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern, to which can be added his later recordings of Debussy and Berg. Here are his complete recordings of 20th-century music, brought together on a 6-CD set for the first time.

CD 1
STRAVINSKY: Three Movements from Petrushka
PROKOFIEV: Piano Sonata No. 7 in B flat major, Op. 83
WEBERN: Variations for piano, Op. 27
BOULEZ: Piano Sonata No. 2
Maurizio Pollini, piano

CD 2
NONO: Como una ola de fuerza y luz for soprano, piano, orchestra and tape
Slavka Taskova, soprano
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks / Claudio Abbado
.....sofferte onde serene... for piano and magnetic tape dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini
Maurizio Pollini, piano
MANZONI: Masse: Omaggio a Edgard Varese for piano and orchestra
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Berliner Philharmoniker / Giuseppe Sinopoli
Live recording

CD 3
SCHOENBERG
Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11
Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19
Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23
Suite for Piano, Op. 25
Piano Piece, Op. 33a
Piano Piece, Op. 33b
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 42
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Berliner Philharmoniker / Claudio Abbado

CD 4
BARTOK
Piano Concerto No. 1 Sz 83
Piano Concerto No. 2 Sz 95
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Claudio Abbado

CD 5
DEBUSSY: 12 Etudes
BERG: Sonata for Piano, Op. 1
Maurizio Pollini, piano

CD 6
DEBUSSY:
Preludes
L'Isle joyeuse
Maurizio Pollini, piano