Word: pollini
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...Maurizio Pollini: Piano Music of the 20th Century. Igor Stravinsky: Three Movements from "Petrushka. "Serge Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 7. Béla Bartók: Concertos for Piano and Orchestra Nos. I and 2. Arnold Schönberg: 17 short piano pieces. Anton Webern: Variations for Piano. Pierre Boulez: Second Sonata for Piano. Luigi Nono: Music for Soprano, Piano, Orchestra and Magnetic Tape (Slavka Taskova, soprano, and the Symphony Orchestra of the Bayerischen Rundfunks, Claudio Abbado, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon, five LPs). Pollini's herculean fingering stands out even in that select circle of great young pianists to which...
...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...
...Pollini's personal life remains private, fenced off behind the rows of neutral facts in program notes. He was the only child of a prominent modernist architect in Milan. He began playing the piano at five and immediately felt "a special connection" with the instrument. At eleven, he gave his first public performance. Today, in between the 60 or so concerts he plays a year, he lives in Milan with his wife and baby...
...Pollini and Nono spend part of each summer at Conductor Claudio Abbado's house in Sardinia, playing netball and cards and, of course, arguing politics. (Pollini and Abbado are former members of the Communist Party, Nono still belongs.) When Pollini is not going to the movies -Woody Allen is a favorite-he reads constantly to enrich his musical culture: criticism, biographies, memoirs. In his practicing, as in everything about the piano, he goes his own way. There was, for instance, the time he closeted himself to prepare for an important concert. Friends, hearing no music, opened his door...