Mourning in the world of music , but not only, for the farewell to Maurizio Pollini , the famous pianist who died yesterday morning in Milan after a long illness.
«We have lost a giant – the memory of Riccardo Muti -. He was a complete musician, he even conducted an opera. A great generation of musicians is disappearing, that of the 1940s, who brought the name of Italy to the world." Of Pollini, just 18 years old and victorious, in 19670, at the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Arthur Rubinstein had exclaimed: «'This young man already plays technically better than all of us'».
Pollini, who turned 82 on January 5 , had canceled the last scheduled concerts for health reasons . The funeral home, as already happened for Carla Fracci, will be held at La Scala, a theater to which Pollini was very attached.
THE INTERPRETATION – His has always been an interpretation 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 was in his cultural education, due to his family environment (his father was a well-known rationalist architect and his mother a musician and sister of the painter and sculptor Fausto Melotti) and acquaintances in the 1960s, starting with the one with Nono.
His musical interests and his repertoire did not remain limited in continuous study, but rather gradually opened up to new tests and explorations ranging from Bach and Mozart , of which he brought to new light all the subtle harmonic and timbral facets, passing through the beloved Chopin , of whom, starting from the new less rigid readings of Rubinstein, he profoundly renewed the understanding, and Beethoven, up to the moderns, among whom Schonberg stands out, and also Italian contemporaries, such as Berio and Nono.
The artistic life of Maurizio Pollini, born in 1942 and raised in Milan, has always been closely linked to the , 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 his victory in Warsaw, with Chopin's First Concerto conducted by Celibidache, and then constantly for over 150 recitals and concerts as a soloist or with the most important conductors, starting with his friend Abbado.
