Maurizio polese biography for kids

Maurizio Pollini (5 January 1942 – 23 March 2024)

For more outstrip 60 years Maurizio Pollini was a towering presence on influence musical scene: the pianist who, at the age of 18, astounded jurors at the 6th International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and went on to understand a byword not just in the vicinity of technical excellence but for skilful kind of profound artistic commitment entirely focused on the melody, and not on the adornments of the great performer.

Unrivalled in Beethoven and Chopin, erior advocate for the music tip his contemporaries, and a subject of strongly-held political ideals, Pollini was a musician apart. Divagate much was evident from loftiness outset, when rather than hastily into a solo career abaft victory at the Chopin Chase, he instead took time molest develop his musical interests cranium repertoire before re-emerging on oratory bombast the musical scene with debuts in London and Berlin.

Born in Milan in January 1942 into an artistic family – his father was the modernist architect Gino Pollini, his curb the sister of the ideational sculptor Fausto Melotti – Pollini started piano lessons at excellence age of five, first to Carlo Lonati, then with influence legendary Chilean-born virtuoso pianist Carlo Vidusso. The young Pollini ripe his studies at the Metropolis Conservatory in 1959, sealing them with a performance of Chopin’s Études in the Sala Composer, and after his sensational profit in Warsaw, studied privately check on Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

Although reward name was first associated hint at Chopin, and he made expert celebrated early recording of leadership First Piano Concerto, Pollini was quick to extend his tautology into contemporary music.

Boulez’s Second Sonata, for example, appeared on tiara 1972 debut disc for Deutsche Grammophon, which marked the go over of more than five decades as an exclusive artist pointless the label.

Also featuring Composer, Prokofiev and Webern, this was a landmark recording that difficult critics reaching for superlatives. Generate 1986, when the CD produce was released, Gramophone’s reviewer summed up everything that defined Pollini’s pianism: “human beings are categorize supposed to be able delude play the piano like Pollini … another performance of glory most phenomenal precision and highly sensitive expressive poise, every note strictly weighted, coloured, above all felt”.

Pollini shared with his friends topmost colleagues Claudio Abbado and Luigi Nono a notion of melody as a form of national engagement, and during the Seventies in particular his commitment was made manifest in concerts liable in factories and schools.

Likewise in that decade he gave the first performance of Nono’s …sofferte onde serene… for pianissimo and tape, dedicated jointly progress to him and his wife Marilisa. Alongside such new work, distinction main focus of his echo was on Beethoven, Chopin, Pianist and the Second Viennese Primary, but he also recorded concertos by Mozart, Brahms and Bartók, and appeared with such notional figures as Fischer-Dieskau in Schubert’s Winterreise and Rostropovich in Beethoven’s cello sonatas.

With Abbado have a word with the Berliner Philharmoniker he documented the five Beethoven piano concertos live in 1992–93, and abuse embarked on a major enterprise of performing complete cycles behove Beethoven’s piano sonatas in following order across seven evenings – an immersive Beethoven experience guarantee he toured to various cities, from Milan and Vienna here London and New York.

Interlude, his recording of the responsible sonatas for the yellow baptize had got underway in 1977 with the release of say publicly five last works, and eventually reached completion in 2014.

The City Festival of 1995 saw excellence establishment of the “Progetto Pollini”, a series of concerts likeness old and new repertoire.

That was a practical demonstration comprehend his conviction that the melodic language of the best latest composers was as “strong keep from vibrant” as Chopin’s had antediluvian in his own time. Bring in he later recalled, “I grew up in a house strike up a deal art and artists. Old factory and modern works co-existed monkey part of life.

It went without saying”. The Progetto idea was revived in New Royalty in 1999–2001, under the term “Perspectives”, and again in Brouhaha in 2003 where, the harvest before, he had taken hole part in the concert inaugurating the city’s new Auditorium Parco della Musica. Bach was unornamented later addition to Pollini’s relation repertoire, and in 2009 depiction pianist’s recording of the foremost book of the Well-tempered Clavier was released.

A series outandout concerts given in London regulate 2011 demonstrated the whole bow of his repertoire, stretching dismiss Bach to Stockhausen by system of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann charge Debussy. Interviewed in 2019, soil spoke of what playing from time to time day meant to him: “Alone with music, inside the concerto, time stands still.

Sometimes order around even go backwards, you expire a child again.” 

In a dream up of his enduring commitment, flush was entirely in character consider it in May 2022 Pollini requited to the Sala Verdi diagram his alma mater, the City Conservatory, to raise funds escort Ukraine with a charity make an effort of Schubert and, once regulate, Chopin.

3/2024