Music Reviews : New Recital, Same Approach by Pollini

A role model to many pianists of the younger generation, Maurizio Pollini remains a controversial keyboard artist to longtime musical observers.

As noted a year ago, when the Milanese pianist gave an engrossing recital in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, Pollini favors sobriety over musical characterization, literalism over nuance, brainy interpretations over spontaneous ones.

A superior, even sovereign, technician who very seldom inserts his own personal responses to the music he plays, the Italian virtuoso, now 50, seems content to produce at the piano unadorned musical texts, not readings of particular individuality.

His playing, we thought at the time, could give objectivity a bad name.

Wednesday night, back at the Pavilion, Pollini repeated himself. The program was new, but the approach was the same.

In two beloved Beethoven sonatas, the famous ones of Opus 7 and Opus 109, he seemed to dissect the musical properties of each work without reassembling, integrating or adding to our knowledge of it. If he has a personal response to either the great E-flat Sonata or the lyric E-major masterwork, he kept such response a secret.

Style is not his problem; neither is articulation, mechanical resources or understanding of the score at hand. What is often missing in his performances, and what was missing Wednesday was an emotional overview, a musical embrace, if you will, to tie together--make sense of--the many separate elements that make up a communicative performance.

Pollini devoted the second half of this recital to the 12 Etudes of Chopin’s Opus 10, in a curiously unmoving--though plenty fast--run-through. Some of these familiar items surprisingly seemed longer than usual, even though played with breakneck speed.

There were no missteps, no faltering or letdown of drive. But the opposite fault, a real blurring of musical content, occurred too often, causing one to suspect that, unlike the composer, Pollini considers these pieces merely technical studies, not character-pieces as well. The evening, then, was turning out to be a sterile experience.

Two handsomely laid-out encores contradicted that generality. They were, of course, by Chopin: the Nocturne in D-flat, Opus 27, and the A-flat Etude, Opus 25, o. 2.