The Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini, who has died aged 82, was one of the giants of the keyboard in the second half of the 20th century, and yet for all the respect he commanded, his playing was criticised throughout his career for being excessively cool and cerebral. When he took first prize at the 1960 Chopin competition in Warsaw, the chairman of the jury, Artur Rubinstein, declared: “That boy plays better than any of us jurors.” But that success proved to be only the prelude to the first controversial event of his career. He withdrew from the international concert circuit for 18 months to broaden his repertoire and develop other cultural interests. It was not until nearly the end of the decade that his performance schedule achieved a normal rhythm, but his full return in 1968, coinciding with a contract signed with the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) label, launched a series of triumphs on the concert platform and in the recording studio.
Classic recordings of Chopin Etudes, of music by Schumann and Beethoven, and of modernist repertoire such as Pierre Boulez’s Second Sonata consolidated his reputation and, at its best, Pollini’s playing combined expressive but unsentimental intimacy, tonal beauty, textural clarity and a formidable technique. Particularly in his later years, Pollini’s breathless, impatient delivery of Beethoven’s sonatas often seemed to deny their rhetoric, as though he was embarrassed by large romantic gestures or overt emotionalism.
