Maurizio Pollini, Festival Hall - music review

At 72 years old, Maurizio Pollini has lost none of his appetite for performance
Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Image
20 February 2014

Maurizio Pollini shuffles on stage like an aging but still willing valet. Then he sits at his Steinway (customised by the Italian firm Fabbrini: he never leaves home without it) and instantly he becomes lord of all he surveys. At 72 years old, Pollini has lost none of his appetite for performance.

He dedicated this concert to his former collaborator Claudio Abbado, who died last month. That added poignancy to the stately funeral march of Chopin’s Second Sonata. In Pollini’s reading, the sonata’s opening movement was by turns angry and restless, the second turbulent, as if there was no time to lose. The march itself had a sense of deep feeling held in check, while the brief climax was a whirling torrent of emotion. In other Chopin, Pollini was as restlessly forward-looking as ever. There was raw power in the often angry fusillades of notes but he also found reflective eloquence in quieter passages, as in the questing inwardness of the Opus 45 Prelude, or the lullaby-like opening of the second Ballade.

The second half of the recital consisted of Debussy’s Preludes Book One, a magical set delivered with 360-degree vision. While his right hand wove intricate filigrees in, for example, Veils, his left delivered low vibrations that, in The West Wind, resembled guttural groans. There was playfulness, too, in the capering strut of Minstrels. Pollini’s Debussy has both poetry and muscle, his involuntary exhalations sounding like distant radio interference.

He returns for an all-Beethoven recital on April 2. Start queuing now.

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