Maurizio Pollini, eighty years in music

For the series “Great Pianists at La Scala” Maurizio Pollini could not miss, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in the company of Schumann and Chopin, chosen in some of the most complex and daring works of their repertoire. Pollini has never spared himself, and he does not do so today by rethinking these sumptuous works; it matters little that piano resistance and technical control can no longer have the perfection of a few years ago, while the immaculate musical vision of the piece is always the same, with that sense of proportions, peaks and distensions that make up the substance, the interior landscape of music. The confrontation with Schumann opened with the murmur, almost a whisper, of Arabesque op.18, occasionally interrupted by reveries, poetic digressions; then the great Fantasia op.17, impregnated with harsh contrasts (the dark sound, from Wagnerian tubas, found by our pianist for the piece “In stile di leggenda” is beautiful). With Chopin unchanged the spiritual congeniality of Pollini: enchanting the grace of the third Mazurca of op. 56, but above all admirable the Barcarola op. 60, perhaps the apex of the evening, with its rhythmic swell, the expressive “legate” as a clarinet, the so spontaneous “rubati”: in the finale, when the left hand plays a severe melody under the fantastic sprint of the right, that “mysterious apotheosis” of which Ravel had spoken really seemed to take place. Other delicious pages with the Fourth Ballad and the first Scherzo, with the oasis of its interlude, a song of infinite tenderness. Cheers and the audience of La Scala standing up to thank the great pianist, who at the end sits down once again at the piano: but not for a piece, it wouldn’t be like him, but for the First Ballad again by Chopin, a lesson in commitment and love for the music