Word: ponti
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Last week Ponti began a recital at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall with a Beethoven sonata at 7:50 p.m. By 8:20 he had flung himself into one of the fiercest challenges in the entire piano literature: both books of Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Paganini. He continued with Chopin's powerful Sonata in B Minor, another sonata by Scriabin, a wrist-cracking Etude for the Left Hand by Blumenfeld, and finally Stravinsky's Three Scenes from Petrouchka, a piece that bristles with so many notes that much of it is written on three...
Chinese Menu. It was a far less gaudy finale than Ponti had provided for his New York debut in March. Then the audience had been given a written list of the pianist's repertory of 48 flamboyant encores and invited to select their favorites, Chinese menu-style: one from Group A, two from Group B, and soon...
...that evening, the first exhausted listeners were trickling dazedly out of the hall, but Ponti was still up there flailing away. He finally finished nine of his 48 pieces at 11:20 p.m., 20 minutes after the theater crew had gone into expensive overtime...
Such pyrotechnics-and endurance-developed slowly. Born in Germany, the son of a German mother and an American father, Ponti was brought to America in 1939 when he was 1½ years old. His father went to work as a consular official for the State Department, his mother taught German at the University of Maryland, and Michael thumped away at the piano...
...Instead, Ponti went to Germany and enrolled at the Frankfurt Conservatory. There he began his penchant for marathon practicing-but only of actual compositions. "I never did exercises and scales in my life," he says. "I'm not even a particularly good sight reader. There's no secret to my technique: I just work hard and play the literature...