The great Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini has died in his home-city of Milan. While his repertoire centred on the great Austro-German Romantic piano literature – Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann – and Chopin, he was a noted champion of modern music, often performing the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Gianluca Cascioli, Giacomo Manzoni, George Benjamin and Salvatore Sciarrino.

Among his extensive recorded catalogue, almost exclusively for DG, are numerous now-classic recordings including his set of the last five Beethoven piano sonatas (a Gramophone Award winner in 1977), the Bartók piano concertos Nos 1 and 2 (with Claudio Abbado and the Chicago SO: another Gramophone Award winner, 1979), the Brahms Piano Quintet (with the Quartetto Italiano; Gramophone Award 1980), 20^th-century piano works by Stravinsky (Three Movements from Petrushka), Prokofiev (Piano Sonata No 7), later joined on disc by Webern’s Variations Op 27 and Boulez’s Piano Sonata No 2, the piano concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and the Chopin Piano Concerto No 1 (with the Philharmonia and Paul Kletzki, recorded for EMI). 

Born in Milan to an architect father, Gino Pollini, and a mother, Renata, who was the sister of the sculptor Fausto Melotti, Pollini studied in his home city, graduating from the Conservatory in 1959. The career turning point occurred the next year, when he took First Prize in the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw; the jury was chaired by Arthur Rubinstein and included Nadia Boulanger, Stefan Askenase, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Heinrich Neuhaus and Magda Tagliaferro. After his win he withdrew from public performance for a year (his recording of the Chopin First Concerto followed his return to the stage – ‘Pollini, an eighteen-year-old Italian, gives a spine-tingling performance of this magnificent music, and if you have not in the past thought it magnificent, listen to this performance and be converted’, wrote Roger Fiske in Gramophone in November 1960). He also studied with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli at this time. A hitherto unreleased recording of the Chopin Etudes for EMI, made shortly after his Chopin Competition win, was made available by Testament in 2012 and was awarded Gramophone’s Historic Award (‘All lovers of great piano-playing will need to add this to their collection together with later Pollini, early Ashkenazy, Cortot and, most recently, Perahia. The recording captures much of Pollini’s pristine sound and there are sensible gaps between each Etude, allowing the listener to recover his breath before the start of the next marvel,’ wrote Bryce Morrison in January 2012.)

He made his first studio recording for DG in 1971 – the Stravinsky Petrushka Movements and Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata – and the album was greeted with unanimous acclaim. ‘I cannot think when I last heard such an exciting new piano record – not since that legendary Schumann record that was the first most of us knew of Sviatoslav Richter, perhaps. And the excitement is produced, as then, by a combination of three things: virtuosity of the highest degree, a sense of musical purpose and commitment that is in complete control of the virtuosity, and, finally, first-rate recording,’ wrote Jeremy Noble in June 1972.

Recordings for DG followed regularly and embraced much of the great piano literature – he recorded the Beethoven concertos twice (once with Jochum and Böhm, and later with Abbado), the complete Beethoven sonatas (some twice), the Brahms concertos (three times: Böhm/Abbado/Thielemann) and Mozart piano concertos. His classic Chopin albums include the Nocturnes, Ballades, Polonaises (‘This is Pollini in all his early glory, in expertly transferred performances. Shorn of all virtuoso compromise or indulgence, the majestic force of his command is indissolubly integrated with the seriousness of his heroic impulse,’ wrote Bryce Morrison in February 1999), Preludes, Scherzos and sonatas.

His only appearance as a ‘podium’ conductor on record was when he conducted Rossini’s La donna del lago at Pesaro in 1983, the work’s first-ever recording (for CBS), with a cast that included Katia Ricciarelli, Samuel Ramey, Lucia Valentini-Terrani, Dalmacio Gonzales and Dano Raffanti.

Maurizio Pollini entered the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012.