ROME - Maurizio Pollini, who will turn 80 on January 5, won the first international competition at the age of 15 and when, three years later, in 1960, recently graduated from the Milan Conservatory, Arthur Rubinstein won the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw, who was among the jurors, exclaimed: '' This young man already sounds technically better than all of us ''. Today we can say that that young man has absolutely international fame and has entered the legend of the history of the great pianists. This meant very hard and continuous discipline and now, as he prepares to celebrate his 80th birthday, he admits, as he recently declared, to '' feel a certain fatigue. Pianists age, of course, but on their side they have an excellent antidote, music. Playing every day for hours and hours is better than going to the gym:keeps the brain awake, hands agile. At the keyboard the pains pass, the years are forgotten. Alone, immersed in music, time stops. Sometimes it even goes back and comes 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 which, together with a profound musical culture and skill, always allows him to highlight the structural construction of a piece tackled with a rational spirit, but in which the feeling, the melancholy or passionate vein gradually emerges as the very substance of the details and form of the composition, with less rigidity that has also arrived over time: '' today my interpretation is freer in the rhythm and that there are more elements of 'rubato' - he confessed three years ago - but always remaining far from the exaggerations of the late nineteenth century ''. His is a 'interpretation that he always wanted to be based on total respect for the written text, but always remaining very modern, without lyrical abandonments or virtuosic elegance, with an expressive force entirely internal to the work.
A modernity that is in his cultural background which, due to a family environment (his father was a well-known rationalist architect and his mother a musician sister of the painter and sculptor Fausto Melotti) and frequentations in the 60s, starting from that with Nono, do not live art and music as something detached from life and therefore made him 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 expresses his views, critical of the Berlusconi governments since the Vietnam war. Thus his musical interests, his repertoire have not remained limited in the continuous deepening, but rather have gradually opened up to new tests and explorations that now go from Bach (for Pollini,as Piero Balloi wrote, `` Bach is almost a romantic '', noting '' the rather generous use of the pedal, the impetuous and flowing phrasing, the often warm and enveloping sound, in other cases more dry and meticulously refined, the ever-wide range of dynamic colors ''), and Mozart, of which he brought to new light all the subtle harmonic and timbral facets, the beauty of the melodic lines, the playfulness and wit, passing through the beloved Chopin, of which, starting with the new, less rigid readings of Rubinstein, he profoundly renewed understanding, and Beethoven, up to the moderns, among which Schonberg stands out, and also Italian contemporaries, such as Berio and Nono. His concerts, when they do not concern complete performances by an author,have been for some years often organized in cycles that also involve other musicians and which are called '' Pollini Projects '', are programs without borders between classic and contemporary, and this is part of his attempt not to educate, but to involve the public in music of one's time, explaining: '' We must learn to understand silence, pauses, as an essential part of music, if we want to understand contemporaries. The news, moreover, has always frightened and required a certain time to establish itself: when Beethoven wrote the Eroica, many said 'we hope that he will return to composing a more gentle music'. But in the meantime the creation goes on ''. This always taking it out with passion and vigor for the situation of music education in our country,practically absent at school and still old in conservatories where '' the programs have ridiculously remained those of my time, when the point of arrival was Bartok's Allegro barbaro: a piece that dates back to the early twentieth century ''.
The artistic life of Maurizio Pollini, born in 1942 and raised in Milan, has always been closely linked to the Teatro alla Scala, where he made his début at the age of sixteen in 1958 performing the world premiere of Ghedini's Fantasia for piano and stringed instruments directed by Thomas Schippers and where he returned two years later, fresh from the victory in Warsaw, with the First Chopin Concerto conducted by Celibidache, and then constantly for over 150 recitals and concerts as soloist or with the most important conductors, starting with his friend Abbado. He also measured himself as an orchestra conductor, even in opera. It is impossible to say where and with whom Pollini has played in over 60 years of activity; it would be a very long list that includes all the major concert halls in the world, orchestras and conductors.He has recorded dozens of CDs and won prizes of international prestige as well as received numerous honors.
