The Debussy Etudes are a natural choice for Pollini's first recording devoted to the French impressionist repertoire. Each is a masterpiece of pianistic and musical invention; each is a gift to an artist of high intelligence and skill.
First impressions promise much. The opening ''Pour les cinq doigts'' has a nice rhythmic lilt in the gigue idea, and the ardour with which it builds to its fierce climax is validated by the strepitoso marking. Every harmonic nuance of the next study, ''Pour les tierces'', is precisely weighted and every link in the chain painstakingly articulated, perhaps too much so. Curiously, not all the thirds are rock steady, however, and by Pollini's Olympian standards there are signs of technical strain elsewhere too. They show in moments of anxiety at the ends of phrases or patterns (''Pour les sixtes'' had me particularly on edge) and in slightly circumspect tempos for the more brilliant studies (such as ''Pour les degres chromatiques'', ''Pour les notes repetees'' and the concluding ''Pour les accords'').
Turn to Mitsuko Uchida and there is an immediate sense of liberation. In those same three studies she conveys, respectively, a lightness, a teasing scherzando, and an elasticity which transcend the technical subject-matter. The greater resonance and airiness of the Philips recording also enable her to let sonorities hang in the air with hypnotic languor. The DG sound by contrast is a fraction boxy and uningratiating, with a bass that growls rather than gonging out. Admittedly some may find Uchida too much at the opposite pole—too resonantly recorded, too hyper-responsive, over-reacting where Pollini under-reacts. So it is good to have Martino Tirimo's civilized readings in the catalogue as a recommendable middle way. But for a single choice I would go for Uchida any day.
Berg's fervidly intellectual Sonata is a challenge even to the finest pianist—witness Barenboim's distressingly effortful account. Pollini's interpretation is remarkable above all for his steady accumulation through the intricacies of the central development section. Only a master pianist could bring such a passage off with such a compelling sense of structural flow. Less happy is his refusal to ease the tempo at structural joins. Even more than in his Debussy this gives a pervading sense of expressive rigidity, and neither playing nor recording is a match for RCA's Barry Douglas.'