Recordings
Chopin's Nocturnes: From Pollini, Nights to Remember
Sunday, August 13, 2006; Page N02
There are two schools of thought about Maurizio Pollini. His admirers consider him one of the greatest pianists in the world, both a spectacular virtuoso and a first-class musical thinker. Pollini's detractors, while granting his ability, generally find his performances brusque, streamlined and dispassionately objective.
In many ways, he calls to mind a modern-day (and rather more cerebral) pianistic answer to the late violinist Jascha Heifetz. Like Heifetz, Pollini is an impeccable technician with an extraordinary command of his instrument, yet he is never ostentatious. He plays and he conquers, with a minimum of personal display; his mastery is simply there , secure and irrefutable.
 Maurizio Pollini: A flawless and unsentimental technician on the two-CD set. (By Phillippe Gontier) |
When Chopin's nocturnes are played in a sentimental fashion, they can seem prettified and self-consciously poetic -- the Chopin of antiquated legend, a sickroom talent propped up at a piano, rolling his eyes heavenward. Pollini's new recording of the complete set (Deutsche Grammophon, two CDs), though, is refreshingly straightforward; he understands and appreciates but never overindulges the moody beauties in these 19 pieces. Nor does he drown them in pedal.
Those who prefer their nocturnes blurry might wish to look elsewhere, but I'd rank Pollini's performances as some of the most affecting I've heard since Arthur Rubinstein's famous renditions from the mid-1960s.
Uchida and Fliter
Mitsuko Uchida plays Beethoven with a welcome element of ferocity. Many pianists approach the last three of the composer's 32 sonatas as mysterious and otherworldly meditations. In Uchida's hands, as a new recording on the Philips label makes clear, they are full-blooded, fiercely dramatic and almost epic.
The essence of Uchida's artistry lies in her sense of steady rhythmic propulsion. This is not to suggest that she forces any sort of straitjacket on the music -- only that one inevitably has a sense that she knows just where she is going. She is capable of spinning out a sweet, songful andante with the best of them, but even then her interpretations are characterized by an unusual emotional boldness. She is naturally at home in this marvelous, mercurial and deeply weird music. Rarely has Beethoven sounded so much like Schönberg -- and in this case, I mean that as a compliment.
The young Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter chose two earlier sonatas by Beethoven, as well as several works by Chopin, to make up her first commercial recording, issued recently on the VAI label.
Washington is lucky to have already heard Fliter (pronounced "fleeter") twice before most of the rest of the country has heard her at all. Not long after her local debut at the Kennedy Center, she was awarded the Gilmore Foundation's Artist Award -- a $300,000 cash prize presented to a pianist every four years.
The same wit, charm, power and lyricism that Fliter brought to her concert are apparent on this disc, which contains Beethoven's Sonatas No. 7 in D (Op. 10, No. 3) and No. 18 in E-flat (Op. 31, No. 3), six waltzes by Chopin and the same composer's "Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise."
Karen Kushner
I have long admired Karen Kushner's complete recording of the complete Chopin mazurkas, issued on two Connoisseur Society CDs in the early 1990s and overdue for reissue. Her performances were at once straightforward and intricately nuanced. She never forgot the fact that the mazurka is, at base, a hearty Polish peasant dance, and she kept within proper rhythmic bounds while allowing Chopin's genius full flight.
Now, after several duo-piano recordings with the late Igor Kipnis and some important performances of music by Kevin Oldham, Kushner has returned to the solo romantic repertory, with an album of works by Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann, as well as one real rarity -- a Sonata in G Minor by Clara Schumann, the great muse and mentor for both men and one of the 19th century's leading pianists and teachers. This last is a sweet, graceful work, filled with potent melodies, written in 1842 but never published until 150 years later.
Kushner's playing is exemplary throughout the album, but I am especially happy with her rendition of Robert Schumann's "Kreisleriana," eight miniatures welling over with fantasy and invention that demand a pianist who will not only read the notes but also give herself entirely to the composer's opulent, idiosyncratic cosmos. This is a beautiful disc.
