Frederic Chopin (1810 – 1849)
Polonaises: Opus 26 (No. 1 and 2); Opus 40 (No. 1 and 2); Opus 44; Opus 53; Opus 61
Maurizio Pollini, Piano
Recorded Vienna, Austria – November 1975
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
He’s a cold-hearted snake (look into his eyes) – but, damn, that Pollini can play!
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LINER NOTES – by Joan Chissell
History was made at Warsaw’s Sixth International Chopin Competition in 1960 when, for the first time, the winner was not a Pole or a Russian but an 18-year-old Italian by the name of Maurizio Pollini.
It was not just his technical mastery that impressed, but an individuality of style differing from the traditionally romantic approach in Poland’s great musical poet. As one distinguished critic tried to explain it: ‘His classicism is entirely modern, illuminating Chopin’s music with a strong floodlight rather than with mellow sunshine.’ Interest was immediately aroused far beyond the confines of the Competition, but self-discipline prevailed.
As the son of an eminent architect, Pollini was able to reject immediate allurements to face the world as a Chopin specialist, proffering instead to follow up earlier tuition under Videsso and Lonati with a few lessons from Michelangeli – and perhaps more significantly to explore a wider repertory, allowing time for his own musical intuitions to mature.
Since his triumphant return to the platform in his later 20s, an ever growing interest in contemporary music (sparked off by an unforgettable performance of Schoenberg’s ‘Peleas and Melisande’ conducted by Mitropoulos) has given him a place apart from so many of his keyboard contemporaries.
But his devotion to the classical and romantic mainstream remains unchanged, with Chopin, needless to say, never long neglected. His recordings of works like the Preludes, Etudes and Polonaises have attained classic status, with the last of these, originally issued in 1976 when he was 34, one of the most arresting of all.
Ever since youthful holidays in the country with school-friends, Chopin had been drawn to Poland’s two most characteristic dances, the aristocratic, ceremonial Polonaise and the humbler peasant Mazurka.
The first of his juvenilia to be published was a G minor Polonaise written at the age of seven, and another eight followed in the next twelve years – each progressing a step further beyond the tuneful, dance-floor style of such would be composers as Orinski, Kupinski and others.
But it was not until Warsaw fell to the Russians in 1831, forcing Chopin to live as an emgre in Paris, that his deepest nationalist sympathies were aroused. And he found no more potent outlet for so passionate an upsurge of feeling than through the Polonaise.
Without sacrifice of the characteristic rhythmic idiosyncrasy underlying its basic triple time, Chopin’s six ensuing Polonaises and the final Polonaise-Fantaisie – all within between 1834 (when he was still only 24) and 1846 (just three years before his death) – transformed the genre from dances into epic tone-poems.
As that distinguished Chopin scholar, the late Arthur Hedley once put it, “A threshold motif runs through them, pride in the past, lamentation for the present, and hope for the future.’
The challenging ‘call-to-arms’ at the start of No. 1 in C sharp Minor gives warning of the magisterial authority Pollini brings to the whole set. But for a pianist sometimes accused of emotional detachment, even coldness, the great surprise is the wealth of subjective sentiment he reveals in the gentler lyricism with which Chopin offsets bolder gestures of defiance – as in the first work’s assuaging central trio.
The darker undertones of No. 2 in E flat Minor are no less intimately nuanced. The second pair, following after a three-year- gap, could scarcely be more strongly characterized and contrasted, the familiar A Major Polonaise recalling the basic essentials of the old dance with stiff-backed aristocratic formality, while its successor in C Minor carries a load of grief in its proud, left-hand melody, only briefly forgotten in the chromatically-tinged nostalgia of its trio.
‘A kind of fantasia in the form of a Polonaise, and I shall call it a Polonaise‘ is how Chopin in a letter to a publisher, described what followed in 1841. In this more extended F sharp Minor work Pollini at once brings home the composer’s growing awareness of a new dramatic potential in the genre, as challenge swells into soaring octave grandeur before a menacing ostrato, presaging disaster, suddenly melts into a simple mazurka – like an idyllic dream of vanished happiness.
A still more heroic note is struck in its immediate successor in A flat Major, where again Chopin resorts to an ostinato (this time descending left-hand staccato octaves articulated here with pinpoint clarity at daring speed) to evoke a sense of steadily mounting tension and resolve – ultimately to blaze into triumph.
Chopin’s farewell to the genre in 1846, significantly entitled Polonaise-Fantaisie, proved his last major work for solo piano; only miniatures followed his break with George Sand that autumn. And it was as if having tugged at every patriot’s heart-strings in full flood of passion, he felt the time had come to ‘recollection emotion in tranquility,’ and to explore still subtler thematic metamorphoses and structural unfoldings.
The searching free-style introduction at once prepares the listener for entry into a chromatically enriched new world in which the sharply defined sectional contrasts of the old dance cede to a seamless continuity of flow. Even the grave, central meditation is imperceptibly merged into a still freely evolving, arch-shaped reprise, with one last blaze of glory before final peace.
Pollini’s supreme achievement here is in suggesting the immediacy and unpredictability of an inspired improvisation while at the same time preserving the shapely unity and inevitability of a pre-conceived whole. Not for nothing did one critic in 1976 hail the set as a whole as ‘well-nigh perfectly realized.’
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TRACK LISTING :
Frederic Chopin (1810 – 1849)
Chopin Polonaises, Maurizio Pollini, Piano
- Polonaise in C-sharp Minor, Opus 26, No. 1 [8:26]
- Polonaise in E-flat Minor, Opus 26, No. 2 [8:37]
- Polonaise in A Major, Opus 40, No. 1 [5:27]
- Polonaise in C Minor, Opus 40, No. 2 [8:06]
- Polonaise in F-sharp Minor, Opus 44 [10:56]
- Polonaise in A-flat Minor, Opus 53 [7:07]
- Polonaise-Fantaisie, Opus 61 [13:14]
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is a long one – so let’s just say – excellent, great virtuosity… just a little cold for my tastes.
Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company