Word: pianist
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...most young pianists, the glittering path that stretched before him would have been the sheerest fantasy fulfillment. But for Pollini, there were two things wrong: it came too easily and too soon. He astonished musical observers by turning his back on celebrity, suspending all recording activity and curtailing most of his concerts. He returned to Milan for a few more years of musical study and reflection; he sought out the reclusive pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli for lessons; he read philosophy and pursued his passion for chess...
...takes an individual of great inner conviction to risk a dropout like that. It also takes a pianist of extraordinary brilliance to come back afterward, on his own terms and at his own pace, to rebuild a major career. Pollini is such an individual and such a pianist. Becoming active again around 1967, he made a belated New York debut in 1968 that was well worth waiting for. By the early 1970s he was ready to resume recording, and a succession of superb discs has followed: the Chopin Etudes, the late Beethoven sonatas, last year's Grammy Award-winning...
...pianist of comparable stature can match Pollini as an exponent of contemporary music. His programs feature the works of Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen and his friend Luigi Nono, alongside more standard offerings. "The music of today is a mirror of our time, of its problems," he says. "Why is it normal to be interested in Picasso and Joyce and not in Schoenberg and Stockhausen?" He has sometimes paid for this conviction by being booed at performances, an experience that he shrugs off: "No response at all would be worse." Once, in Vienna, a Stockhausen score called for him to strike...
...eternity. As such, it represents a musical interpretation of Souss's belief "that man must take destiny into his own hands." Born in Jerusalem in 1945, Souss was only three years old when the Palestinians were expelled from the city after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A gifted pianist, he found himself torn between music and militancy. After the humiliation of the 1967 war, he joined the P.L.O. "The essence of Palestine is its rejection of the idea of exile," he says. "From 1948 until five years ago, the world said, 'Let them be dispersed. Let them...
...artificial, documentary nature of the proceedings actually makes for some of the film's most precious moments. Pianist Jay McShann grins and mimics a journalist's banal patter: "Joe Turner, you know that you are a Kansas City figure. You're a backbone of Kansas City, so tell us something about yourself." Later, Basie sits down at the foundation's scarred piano and improvises a few bars of two-fisted stride, then looks up, deadpan, at the camera: "That...