Reluctant Cinderella

Meet that distinguished dropout, Italy's Maurizio Pollini

In the early 1960s Maurizio Pollini of Milan, Italy, looked like the keyboard's most glamorous Cinderella since Van Cliburn of Kilgore, Texas, conquered Moscow. At 18, Pollini beat out a field of 78 to win the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He was promptly whisked off to recording studios in London, and the result--an LP of the Chopin Concerto No. 1--brought critical raves on both sides of the Atlantic. Concert bookings were thrust upon him.

For most young pianists, the glittering path that stretched before him would have been the sheerest fantasy fulfillment. But for Pollini, there were two things wrong: it came too easily and too soon. He astonished musical observers by turning his back on celebrity, suspending all recording activity and curtailing most of his concerts. He returned to Milan for a few more years of musical study and reflection; he sought out the reclusive pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli for lessons; he read philosophy and pursued his passion for chess.

It takes an individual of great inner conviction to risk a dropout like that. It also takes a pianist of extraordinary brilliance to come back afterward, on his own terms and at his own pace, to rebuild a major career. Pollini is such an individual and such a pianist. Becoming active again around 1967, he made a belated New York debut in 1968 that was well worth waiting for. By the early 1970s he was ready to resume recording, and a succession of superb discs has followed: the Chopin Etudes, the late Beethoven sonatas, last year's Grammy Award-winning set of Bartok concertos. Last week, as Pollini completed a three-week swing through the U.S., including two stunning recitals in Carnegie Hall, he left behind little doubt that, at 38, he has moved into the forefront of the world's pianists.

Even in an age when a juggernaut technique tends to be taken for granted, Pollini's is outstanding. Triphammer octaves, high-velocity passage work, densely woven inner voices, all are managed with breathtaking ease and control. In highly rhythmic, percussive music--Prokofiev, Bartok, Stravinsky--he attacks with exhilarating ferocity and precision.

Stylistically, he favors clean, sharp-edged, objective interpretations, free of flourishes and exaggerations even in the most romantic repertory. Some listeners consequently miss a certain warmth and spontaneity in his playing. Although capable of producing beautiful sonorities, he is admittedly not the poet or colorist that, say, Vladimir Ashkenazy is. Nor, despite his limpid, shapely way with Mozart and Beethoven, does he share the Austro-German classical tradition of an Alfred Brendel. Yet everything he does arises from such a deep, individualized conception, and is brought off with such musicality and unforced virtuosity, that it carries its own commanding authority.

No pianist of comparable stature can match Pollini as an exponent of contemporary music. His programs feature the works of Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen and his friend Luigi Nono, alongside more standard offerings. "The music of today is a mirror of our time, of its problems," he says. "Why is it normal to be interested in Picasso and Joyce and not in Schoenberg and Stockhausen?" He has sometimes paid for this conviction by being booed at performances, an experience that he shrugs off: "No response at all would be worse." Once, in Vienna, a Stockhausen score called for him to strike a row of keys with his arm and hold them down for 30 seconds. As Pollini remained bent motionless over the keyboard, a whisper came from the first row: "He is exhausted."

If Pollini the musician is a critic's dream, Pollini the man is an interviewer's nightmare. He is agreeable and fairly fluent in English, but too shy to traffic in epigrams and anecdotal revelations. Wearing dark-rimmed glasses that are never seen onstage, he sits there, nervously smoking Pall Malls and tapping his foot, turning away one question after another. His ultimate artistic goals? "[Puff.] I try to do in the best possible way this music. That is all." What about his reputation for radical politics? During the Viet Nam War, wasn't he hissed and shouted off the stage in Milan for trying to read an anti-U.S. manifesto before playing? "I am involved in a ... personal way. [Puff.] Every man has a responsibility. [Puff, puff.]"

So Pollini's personal life remains private, fenced off behind the rows of neutral facts in program notes. He was the only child of a prominent modernist architect in Milan. He began playing the piano at five and immediately felt "a special connection" with the instrument. At eleven, he gave his first public performance. Today, in between the 60 or so concerts he plays a year, he lives in Milan with his wife and baby son.

Pollini and Nono spend part of each summer at Conductor Claudio Abbado's house in Sardinia, playing netball and cards and, of course, arguing politics. (Pollini and Abbado are former members of the Communist Party, Nono still belongs.) When Pollini is not going to the movies --Woody Allen is a favorite--he reads constantly to enrich his musical culture: criticism, biographies, memoirs. In his practicing, as in everything about the piano, he goes his own way. There was, for instance, the time he closeted himself to prepare for an important concert. Friends, hearing no music, opened his door to investigate. He was seated at the piano, but the lid was closed. On it rested a chessboard on which he was intently playing against himself.

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