(ANSA) - ROME, 02 JAN - Maurizio Pollini, who will turn 80 on January 5, won the first international competition at 15 and when, three years later, in 1960, having just graduated from the Milan Conservatory, he won the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Arthur Rubinstein, who was among the hygienists, exclaimed: "This young man already technically sounds better than all of us." Today that young man we can say that he has entered the legend of the history of the great pianists. This meant very hard discipline and now, he admits, as he recently declared, that he “feels a certain amount of fatigue.
Pianists age, of course, but they have an excellent antidote on their side, music. Playing for hours and hours every day is better than going to the gym: it keeps your brain awake, your hands agile. At the keyboard the pains pass,the years are forgotten.
Alone, immersed in music, time stops. Sometimes he even went back and came back young. '' His studies, after the success in Warsaw, continued and had a high moment in perfecting with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli who also helped him to work further on the technique that always allows him to highlight the structural construction of a piece dealt with spiritually, but in which he then makes slowly emerge the feeling, the melancholy or passionate vein as the very substance of the composition.
A modernity that is in its cultural formation that does not live art and music as something detached from life and therefore made it an intellectual artist who has always publicly expressed his ideas and his civil and political commitment, as when in the 70s he played in schools and factories, or when he expresses his opinions, critic from the times of the Vietnam war to the Berlusconi governments.
Thus his musical interests have not remained limited in the continuous deepening, but rather they have gradually opened up to new tests and explorations that now range from Bach to Mozart, passing through the beloved Chopin and Beethoven, up to moderns, among which Schonberg stands out, and to contemporaries also Italians, such as Berio and Nono.
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