A Maurizio Pollini Playlist

The 2014 EuroArts documentary portrait of Maurizio Pollini, “De main de maître,” opens with a literal portrait: that of the pianist’s great-uncle. The interviewer mistakes the painting for Pollini himself. Pollini recounts the life of his forbear: “He ran away from home when he was 16, in 1800, joined Garibaldi’s army, and took part in the battle of Mentana, which Garibaldi led against the Papal States without the help of the Italian State.” 

It’s a perfect moment of metaphor, veering into metonymy. Pollini, who died on March 23 at the age of 82, was no soldier, but he was a revolutionary in his own right. As often as he was called “aristocratic” for his style (combined with an architectural sense of musical structure that he inherited from his father, a literal architect), Pollini began his career just as he started to develop a political consciousness. He didn’t see the two as one and the same—“Music is one thing, interest in political ideas is another,” he says in “De main de maître”—but in another interview, he did say that great art “has entirely progressive aspects within it, elements that are somehow outside the detail of the text or even the political opinions of the person who made it.” 

Despite frequent criticisms that his technique and intellectual rigor could undermine the emotional heart of a work, I think Pollini was simply working towards a different emotional core, one that placed both old and new music in vital dialogue with the world as it unfolded outside of the concert house; a core that was surrounded by more than the pursuit of absolute beauty (though Pollini could easily tap into that vein as well). These five performances are just a few examples of that dialogue.