Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Webern, etc / Maurizio Pollini

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com essential recording
Pollini is so much a part of the contemporary music scene that it's amazing to realize that the earliest material on this disc (Stravinsky and Prokofiev) dates to the 1940s. These two performances retain their power to startle and amaze, both through Pollini's seemingly effortless virtuosity and through the immediacy of his musical conceptions. This Prokofiev is a close rival even to Richter's. Webern, from six years later, is so colorful and well organized that it makes the difficult music almost easy to listen to. Not many listeners will put up with Boulez's obscurities, but there is still plenty to make the disc worthwhile. --Leslie Gerber

Tracks:

Three Movements From 'Petrushka': 1. Danse russe. Allegro giusto
Three Movements From 'Petrushka': 2. Chez Petrouchka
Three Movements From 'Petrushka': 3. La semaine grasse. Con moto - Allegretto - Tempo giusto - Agitato
Piano Sonata No. 7 In B Flat Major: 1. Allegro inquieto - Andantino
Piano Sonata No. 7 In B Flat Major: 2. Andante caloroso
Piano Sonata No. 7 In B Flat Major: 3. Precipitato
Variations For Piano: I. Sehr massig
Variations For Piano: II. Sehr schnell
Variations For Piano: III. Ruhig fliessend
Second Sonata For Piano: 1. Extremement rapide
Second Sonata For Piano: 2. Lent
Second Sonata For Piano: 3. Modere, presque vif
Second Sonata For Piano: 4. Vif

Amazon.com essential recording

Pollini is so much a part of the contemporary music scene that it's amazing to realize that the earliest material on this disc (Stravinsky and Prokofiev) dates to the 1940s. These two performances retain their power to startle and amaze, both through Pollini's seemingly effortless virtuosity and through the immediacy of his musical conceptions. This Prokofiev is a close rival even to Richter's. Webern, from six years later, is so colorful and well organized that it makes the difficult music almost easy to listen to. Not many listeners will put up with Boulez's obscurities, but there is still plenty to make the disc worthwhile. --Leslie Gerber

Customer Reviews:

What to make of Boulez's 2nd sonata?.......2007-06-02

Here is Pollini, the phenomenally gifted pianist in the music of four 20th-century greats. We start off with Stravinsky, a composer who plainly disliked the piano and left behind very little solo piano music. These transciptions are not original piano music perhaps but they're no throwaways, requiring fiendish virtuosity that Pollini has in spades. Then we get Prokofiev's 7th sonata written during WWII. Pollini gives one of the best readings of this piece in the catalogue, close to matching the great Sviatoslav Richter.

The Webern variations are lucid and beautiful as well and then we come to the biggest piece and the biggest hurdle of this CD. I'm talking about the mammoth Boulez Sonata. A 30 minute piece of rhetoric and brutality and the kind of modernism that falls on deaf ears for most listeners. Boulez was still very young when he wrote it and he moved on from this idiom very quickly onto the more silky, smooth terrain of Le marteau sans maitre in the coming years.

I have read that this particular sonata was Boulez confronting the legacy of the massive Hammerklavier by Beethoven. But while Ludwig van was interested in building up a massive structure, ( far larger than Boulez ), full of vision and philosophical intent, Boulez is interested in destruction. You listen to this piece and get the idea that Boulez really didn't care how it sounded but only in the mathematical processes of it's creation. Pollini has championed this piece for a long time even though it seems more like a relic of the initial postwar era, rather than an immortal barrier breaker like Beethoven's Hammerklavier.

I have been much more fascinated by Boulez's later works but putting this piece on from time to time to annoy and frustrate the listening habits of people with no sympathy for modernism is always fun to do. That would certainly bring a smile to Boulez's old mug.

One of the most electrifying discs of 20th century piano music.......2006-05-10

This disc, while not for the faint of heart or the hesitant in the world of 20th century music, will reward the listener almost instantly with its visceral excitment and raw energy. Pollini, notorious for playing accurately but without passion or emotion, plays in a perhaps similar vein here, but it works in this repertoire. He executes Boulez's fiendish Second Sonata as though the piano had insulted his mother. This work is decidedly difficult to listen to unless one knows it very well and has an understanding of and sympathy for Boulez's methods. Yet there are moments of beauty in the work, and Pollini maintains a delicate touch and attention to phrasing in the slower sections. His Webern Variations are played with a clear understanding of the structural techniques the composer is using as made evident by Pollini's use of rubato and his highlighting of different voices. Finally, his Petrouchka and Prokofiev Seventh have both achieved legendary status since their initial release. There may be little in the way of Mozartian delicacy, but this is brutal music, and it is given the correct treatment by this most excellent Italian pianist. His sound is full and rarely harsh, sections of fast figures feel like a shower of bullets at times, yet it all contributes to the highest level of raw emotion and excitement. Selections from this disc could easily be used to convert a non-believer into a fan of 20th century classical music.

Boulez .......2005-12-13

The Boulez sonata is beautiful and fascinating. Boulez has an uncanny absolute sense of the color of each pitch, and throws weird cascades of notes around like magical sparks of light. Its built with a kind of highly disciplined mathematico-musical system similar to Bach in many ways, in that the logical compositional manipulative processes are just as important as the physical musical sonority, but in this case without regard for a tonal center of gravity. If you allow the music to speak to you without trying to make it fit into an alien and inadequate tonal musical framework, you might be surprised by some of the highly interesting and musical combinations of tones. Boulez is a sorcerer.

Magnificent virtuosity of four major works from the 20th century.......2005-12-09

What an interesting disk! This is playing of a very high order by Pollini at the very top of his peak of his powers. The "Three Movements from Petruska" is a wonderful virtuoso piece that every pianist dreams of playing. Pollini makes every note clear, pulls of amazing orchestral effects, and plays with a brilliance that almost no one else can duplicate.

The Sonata number 7 by Prokofiev is also a wonderful piece. Pollini plays it with intelligence and insight. The last movement is amazing for its energy and ferocious inevitability.

The last two pieces require a different kind of listening that your experience with tonal music will not prepare you. Webern's "Variations" opus 27 is really an interesting work. Give it several listens and you will be surprised how it grows on you.

For me, the Boulez second piano sonata is a different issue. It is immensely complicated and impossible to play (but Pollini pulls it off), but its purpose and beauty eludes me. However, I admit that it just might be a limitation on my part. However, let me point out that one of the problems with the moderns of the mid-twentieth century serialist movement is that the music is not only beyond the understanding of its audiences, it is beyond the playing ability of all but the greatest virtuosi.

Is it mundane to point out that music, in order to be a living part of its culture, has to have an audience that not only listens to it, but learns to play it? Brahms made a tidy living writing very sophisticated music that skilled amateurs could play in addition to his pieces for virtuosi. That these largely academic composers wrote only for each other and actually scorned those who could not understand their works set the stage for their music to fade to the dusty shelf of music libraries at university music schools. And there they will likely remain.

The audience has become important to present day modern composers and notice how the stuff actually gets listened to and appreciated. Now, composers, please write music that amateurs and play and enjoy and you will see how your fame and the appreciation for your work soars!

But that is beside the point of this disk. This is a disk of music for the supreme virtuoso and Pollini makes this disk important and memorable.

One of the top piano discs of my collection.......2005-07-22

This is one amazing disc of piano-playing, one that never ceases to leave my mouth hanging open every time I listen to it. Do yourself a favor if you read music and find a score of the Stravinsky. Follow along as Pollini plays and be amazed, truly amazed.

Amazed not just at the virtuosity, but at how *easy* and effortless he makes it sound. In his hands, it's hard to believe this is *difficult* music, yet the score tells otherwise. This work is so formidable that only a few other pianists have dared tackle it--Gilels, and Horowitz in the first movement only. (A pity, since I would have loved to hear him play the whole thing.) Pollini leaves them all in the dust, with clarity and a directness that's perfect for the work. (Many people say Pollini is a cold and distant interpretor, and I tend to agree, but this apporach served Stravinsky--a man who kept his emotional states out of his music--well.

But Petrushka is just the beginning. The Prokofiev is a stunner. (And listen to how different his color palette is from that of Petrushka!) If it doesn't have quite as much character as Richter, well, that's still a pretty high standard. Once again Pollini rips through it as though it were child's play. I'd maybe prefer a little more of the composer's trademark sardonicism. But the complaint is slight. Kudos also just for the programming on this disc. The Sonata follows Stravinsky perfectly, yet it's of a completely different character. I wonder if Pollini programmed them together in live recitals.

The Webern is an ideal piece for people who say they don't like atonal music. It's a great introduction--short, succinct and relatively easy to follow. Pollini actually finds what to me sounds like lyricism in a place you wouldn't necessarily expect lyricism. The performance builds with great, though subtle, tension, and again Pollini's clarity is ideal for delineating the piece. This is a great way to be introduced to The Second Viennese School, and to Webern.

Finally comes one of the most famous, or infamous, of 20th century piano works, Boulez's Second Sonata. I can't speak knowledgeably about this piece, as I'm still discovering it. But Idil Biret's recording strikes me as "warmer," if you can call something atonal by Boulez warm. And the recent Paavali Jumppanen recording seems to connect the dots better. But such observations should be taken as a grain of salt, for I am, as I said, still learning this strange and extremely complex work.

It's interesting how the works become more abstract and dissonant as the disc goes on. This is not just a terrifically-played piano recording; it's also a study of the decay of Western tonality and the rise of a new music system. It's also one of the most thrilling and unique piano records in DG's entire catalog. Snap it up!

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