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Maurizio Pollini with conductor Christian Thielemann
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Legacy of a legend
In March, we marked the passing of the great Maurizio Pollini. The composer always ranked above the performer in Pollini’s hands, and his pianism has sometimes been criticised as chilly. Listening to his DG recording of Schumann’s Fantasie – one of my most treasured albums – I hear a burning heart and strong emotions, supported by a phenomenal technique. Pollini could mould avantgarde works by Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono with the same structural elegance he brought to a Beethoven sonata.
‘This boy plays better than any of us,’ said Arthur Rubinstein to fellow jury members when Pollini won the Chopin Competition in 1960. What more can I say? Where Pollini stood out was in his imaginative grasp of the possibilities to be found within the piano itself, such as the raw percussiveness of the instrument in Bartók’s concertos. It is as if Pollini had a hotline to the composers’ characters via their pianos, or was familiar with the very
instruments on which they wrote. Warwick Thompson discusses this idea in his ‘Composers and their own Keyboards’ article, starting out with the hired upright piano on which Chopin composed some of his Préludes in Majorca. He takes us on a journey from Beethoven’s renovated Broadwood in Vienna, to the revolutionary Steinway which Liszt encountered towards the end of his life, to Britten’s concert grand, on which Leeds Lieder festival director Joseph Middleton has played at Britten’s home in Aldeburgh. Can we learn about the composer through the medium of their piano? Middleton emphatically believes so. Where Pollini stood up for 20th-century modernists, Paul Wee has made a name for himself with lesser-known names at the end of the Romantic tradition. If his new versions of concertos by Henselt and Bronsart are anywhere near as convincing as his earlier Alkan and Thalberg albums, we’re in for a treat. In the pages of Pianist, too, we like to give a voice to neglected composers, and this issue includes a focus on Samuil Maykapar, introduced by Michael Mills. I’ve fallen in love with Maykapar’s Pensée fugitive No 6, played beautifully by Chenyin Li on this issue’s Pianist album, and I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know it too.
As we continue to listen to Pollini’s recorded legacy, sifting out what we like and what we don’t, we will always learn from the virtuosos of each new generation. You will have to wait a while until you can listen to cover artist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason’s debut album, due for release by Sony Classical in spring 2025, but she too, believes in standing up for under-represented composers… read on.
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