Chopin was where Pollini’s career began, and in a year’s time an all-Chopin disc will seal his place as a Great Pianist of the Twentieth Century. But Pollini’s first appearance in the pantheon comes in two generously and imaginatively programmed discs which create a satisfying and enriching recital as well as providing a true and telling portrait of Pollini himself.
Twenty years of his career are spanned through his unique responses to the classical-romanticism of Schubert and Schumann, and by way of his voracious appetite for the music of our own century. A distinctive impetuousness and brilliance bring to life the Florestan and the Eusebius within Schumann’s Sonata No. 1: their coming and going is given eloquence and coherence through the rhythmic and structural clarity of Pollini’s 1973 performance.
That same glinting light illuminates his 1989 Liszt Sonata: not as dark, nor as grandiloquent, as it is in many hands, the work takes on the nature of an evanescent fantasy, devilish in its extraordinarily light, rapid fingerwork, open-eyed in the wonder and poignancy which radiates from its centre. Pollini’s Chopin B minor Scherzo is cunningly juxtaposed. Recorded just a year later, it crackles with a similar diablerie, with more than a glimpse of the cloven hoof in its cross-etchings of chromatic angles and dislocated rhythms.
Pollini’s fingers and imaginative antennae are sentient enough to pick up in mercurial insights the flickering tonal ambivalence and fast-shifting moods of late Schubert in his three Klavierstucke. A bold performance of the Webern Variations reveals the unique and highly charged “fusion of intellectual passion and poetry” on which Gramophone remarked (6/95) in Pollini’s championship of the Second Viennese School.
His Debussy, recently experienced in its characteristically concentrated abstraction in London, is represented here by six Etudes (more to come in Vol. 2). Sparks fly high from the most outrageously grand of grand finales: three scenes from Petrushka played with superhuman speed and accuracy, and multi-dimensional in their imaginative prowess.'