Music Reviews : Pollini Challenges Partisan Audience

After a spate of recent disappointments in this midwinter piano season, our fortunes seem to have turned around. Saturday night, for instance, one’s sagging confidence in that generation of pianists now under 40 got a boost in a wondrous recital given by Santiago Rodriguez at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Tuesday night, more rescue from the doldrums arrived. The justly celebrated Maurizio Pollini, who, at 49, represents the previous generation, returned after an absence and gave as serious a recital as ever was heard in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center.

Too serious? Probably not--but too sober, for sure.

In a program beginning with the Preludes, Opus 28, of Chopin and ending with Stravinsky’s Three Movements from “Petrushka,” the Italian pianist may have been attempting to give objectivity a bad name.

He seemed to put all this music--also including Alban Berg’s Opus 1 Sonata and Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, Opus 19--under a microscope, subjecting it to a scrutiny more rational than affectionate. Here was much light, but little heat, a lot of thinking but no great communication.

Chopin’s exigent set of Preludes survived the process not badly at all. Thirty-one years after taking first prize in the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Pollini remains a persuasive stylist in that composer’s music, one who can produce elegant, long-breathed musical statements rife with convincing detail, and commands all the resources to do so.

Each of the 24 miniatures benefitted from the pianist’s long acquaintance and authoritative touch.

Some of them (Nos. 2, 6 and 7, for instance) became thrilling through understatement and simplicity. Others (Nos. 1, 3, 15 and 21) seemed perfectly benign and purposefully standoffish. A few (Nos. 8, 10 and 12, for instance) suffered from generalized, rather than specific, emotional states.

Anger, a mood one would have expected at least five of these pieces to reflect, never made an appearance--not even in that most vehement Prelude, the last one.

Except for recurring hard-edged tone, particularly in the “Petrushka” scenes--Pollini played this time on an especially brilliant Hamburg Steinway--the second half of this event showed the same resourcefulness demonstrated in the first.

Berg’s breathless passion emerged only a bit reserved; Schoenberg’s miniature reflections ran a wide gamut; “Petrushka” proved properly noisy but well-controlled.

The two encores were Debussy’s Etude No. 11 (“Pour les arpeges composes”) and Chopin’s B-flat-minor Scherzo.