•
Rating: Last night's concert-event at the Parco della Musica: Maurizio Pollini returns to play in Rome with a 'predictable' program dedicated to Schumann and Chopin in an auditorium filled to the brim, which also saw the presence, quite discreet to be honest, of President Napolitano and his wife. Even classical music has learned the strategies of marketing: Chopin, whom Pollini is considered, if not the Interprete par excellence, certainly one who made school, could not be missing, especially in view of the widespread advertising of his latest CD dedicated precisely to the Polish composer.
Looking at the illuminated piano, I wondered which Pollini I would listen to, the one from my childhood memories, the twenty-five-year-old pianist smiling from the covers of old vinyl records, playing Chopin in a clear and refined way, without affectation and hysteria, with a touch and a multifaceted and diverse sound that seduced, fascinated, and captivated me, thus filling the lack of passion that I felt was part of Chopin's music, or would it be the mature Pollini, whose poetics have evolved in a highly rationalistic direction, too much so, the one who, like an abandoned and wounded lover, led me to say "He is a pianist I've never liked"?, trying to forget with deliberate and ostentatious stubbornness, the hours spent listening to his records. Yet, yesterday, I was ready to change my mind to be able to write that I had heard him play "unexpectedly" well: he played. The formidable, insidious, and in some ways enigmatic, "Kreisleriana" by Schumann, but also the "Nocturnes" op. 48 and the "Scherzo" op 39 by Chopin, were a performance of? all the notes, few moments of uncertainty, a great display of keyboard mastery and astonishing ease of execution, all without virtuoso ostentation. Pollini was there, he was present, but where was Schumann? Where was Chopin? Where was the candor, the spontaneity, the wonder, the poetry? Where was the dichotomous complexity that always emerges in the pages of a Schumann who, behind his masks, is Pirandellianly "One, None and One Hundred Thousand", a character in constant transformation like many of his musical themes: an interpretation so intellectual it seemed shallow; a unidirectional, monochrome interpretation so uniform and lacking in complexity, where no theme, no melodic line ever managed to fully emerge, suffocated by a way of playing that was never relaxed, without breath, where everything piled upon each other without giving time for the applause to fade, thus depriving it of its characteristic element: the contrast between fairy-tale and real, imaginary and concrete.
A Pollini who, granting little to lyricism and emotional heights, even in Chopin, seems to want to dominate that instinct he has and has demonstrated to have, that natural tendency of all musicians to build phrases and conclude them: I had to wait for the encores, also by Chopin, including the "Etude" op.10 no. 12 and the I Ballade, to hear not just an avalanche of notes played at supersonic speeds, but Music. We don't like Pollini the pianist's choices, not the man: I know perfectly well how much it costs to sit at the piano, I understand the nervousness that leads you to proceed incessantly and without pause, and the lack of breath, of "pause" that creates in the listener an intolerable sensation of perpetual apnea, of always and only moving forward, I understand, it's human; however, total and full participation in the Music, in the end, leaves little room for anxiety, agitation, and nervousness, because it is occupied, as you proceed, by the will-necessity to be led by the heart's movements. which, however, last night, had no space: it was to avoid destroying the magic of the memory of the pianist I listened to as a child that I did not want to listen to the one of today, of whom I see and perceive undeniable capabilities and high artistic quality, but very few emotions, despite the triumph brought by the audience.
Loading comments slowly
