Word: pollini
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
Even in an age when a juggernaut technique tends to be taken for granted, Pollini's is outstanding. Triphammer octaves, high-velocity passage work, densely woven inner voices, all are managed with breathtaking ease and control. In highly rhythmic, percussive music-Prokofiev, Bartok, Stravinsky-he attacks with exhilarating ferocity and precision...
...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...
...Pollini the musician is a critic's dream, Pollini the man is an interviewer's nightmare. He is agreeable and fairly fluent in English, but too shy to traffic in epigrams and anecdotal revelations. Wearing dark-rimmed glasses that are never seen onstage, he sits there, nervously smoking Pall Malls and tapping his foot, turning away one question after another. His ultimate artistic goals? "[Puff.] I try to do in the best possible way this music. That is all." What about his reputation for radical politics? During the Viet Nam War, wasn't he hissed and shouted...