The Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini, who has died aged 82, was one of the giants of the keyboard in the second half of the 20th century, and yet for all the respect he commanded, his playing was criticised throughout his career for being excessively cool and cerebral. When he took first prize at the 1960 Chopin competition in Warsaw, the chairman of the jury, Artur Rubinstein, declared: “That boy plays better than any of us jurors.” But that success proved to be only the prelude to the first controversial event of his career. He withdrew from the international concert circuit for 18 months to broaden his repertoire and develop other cultural interests. It was not until nearly the end of the decade that his performance schedule achieved a normal rhythm, but his full return in 1968, coinciding with a contract signed with the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) label, launched a series of triumphs on the concert platform and in the recording studio.
Classic recordings of Chopin Etudes, of music by Schumann and Beethoven, and of modernist repertoire such as Pierre Boulez’s Second Sonata consolidated his reputation and, at its best, Pollini’s playing combined expressive but unsentimental intimacy, tonal beauty, textural clarity and a formidable technique. Particularly in his later years, Pollini’s breathless, impatient delivery of Beethoven’s sonatas often seemed to deny their rhetoric, as though he was embarrassed by large romantic gestures or overt emotionalism.
Pollini’s cerebral instincts appeared to deprive him of the ability to live in the moment: romantic subjectivity, it seemed, had constantly to be interrogated.
Pollini was born in Milan. His father, Gino Pollini, was one of Italy’s leading architects of the interwar period; his mother, Renata (nee Melotti), who had studied singing and piano, was the sister of the modernist sculptor Fausto Melotti. Such a background, in which “old works and modern works co-existed together as part of life”, as Pollini later put it, was to have a formative influence on his own approach to art. The discovery of his musical talent led to lessons with Carlo Lonati and Carlo Vidusso (from 1955 at the Milan conservatory) and various competition successes prior to Warsaw. His 1963 London debut, playing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the LSO under Colin Davis, was criticised by the Times as “rushed” and over-impetuous.
Peter Andry, the responsible executive at EMI in the early 1960s, told in his autobiography, Inside the Recording Studio (2008), of the pursuit of the 19-year-old who had just won the prestigious Warsaw competition: “We quickly signed the young Italian, a slender, bespectacled young man with an elongated brow but a very pleasant manner.” One of their first (and only) projects together was a recording of the two sets of Chopin Etudes, Opp 10 and 25. It was not long after this that Pollini appeared to suffer a crisis of confidence. EMI sent him off to study for two years with the pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, but even as his musicality deepened, and reviews were often complimentary, Pollini retreated from the spotlight. He refused to allow the Etudes to be released – though this was in part because DG, shortly to sign Pollini as an exclusive artist, wanted to make their own version. The EMI sets were finally released only in 2011 (on Testament), winning plaudits for their spontaneity and freshness.
It was also in the 60s that music and politics first became intertwined in Pollini’s career. A friendship with a fellow-student, Claudio Abbado, a like-minded leftwing idealist, led them to seek radical ways of bringing classical music to factory workers, including a cycle of concerts at La Scala for employees and students. Another friendship, with the Marxist avant garde composer Luigi Nono, was equally important, resulting in the commission of two pieces for Pollini, including one for piano, voice and tapes, commemorating an assassinated Chilean revolutionary. Pollini’s radical outlook remained with him throughout his career, as did his intellectual approach to art and life. If too often that cerebralism seemed at odds with the heroic or passionate romantic sensibility of the music he played, there were compensations: the visionary gleam in a Chopin miniature; the anticipation of modernism in the ghostly finale of the same composer’s Second Piano Sonata.
Even when declining physical stamina took its toll in later recitals, Pollini commanded admiration of a sort for his continued willingness to pit himself against some of the most demanding works in the repertoire. The breathless impatience of his foreshortened phrases was unsettling, but glimpses of the old magic were still in evidence. The programming of his five-concert series The Pollini Project at the Royal Festival Hall, spread over five months in 2011 – which moved from Bach, through late Beethoven and Schubert to Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Debussy to modernists such as Stockhausen and Boulez – represented a personal statement about landmarks in the history of piano music.
His interpretation of Boulez’s Second Sonata, notable for its precision and explosive energy, but also for its lyricism and Debussy-influenced pointillism, remains without peer. Stravinsky’s Petrushka likewise drew from him an incomparable muscularity coupled with tonal clarity that was ideally incisive rather than brutal. If Pollini’s playing was controversial, it was so because it explored the dichotomy of intellect and emotion fundamental to music-making.
He is survived by his wife, Marilisa (nee Marzotto), whom he married in 1968, and their son, Daniele.
• Maurizio Pollini, pianist, born 5 January 1942; died 23 March 2024
