Of the generation of pianists who became well-known in the 1970s, famous in the ’80s and great in the ’90s, Murray Perahia and Maurizio Pollini are the remaining twin pillars. On the weekend of May 20, both of them were in Manhattan, at Carnegie Hall, playing exceptional programs to packed houses.
Perahia is a specialist in Mozart, Schubert, early Beethoven and—since a serious hand injury in 1990—in Bach, to whose scores Perahia turned for solace when he could not play. His program included selections from all four. Pollini has a broad repertoire that goes as far as unnecessary modern music, but he is best known for recordings of Chopin and an extraordinary cycle of late Beethoven. On stage, neither pianist has the technical perfection he once possessed. In exchange for the modest loss of mechanical skill, they have attained a depth of feel that could only come from a lifetime of performance.
Murray Perahia has restrained good humor, a self-effacing smile and fireside warmth. If you switched his tailcoat for a labcoat he’d look like the family doctor. His fondness for the damper pedal, even in Bach, is marked. He claims that it allows him to more closely replicate the humming quality of the harpsichord. His sublime recordings of the French suites make a good case for pedaling in a sound studio. But in Carnegie Hall—a large space and yet a miracle of acoustics—his performance of French Suite No. 6 in E Major lacked clarity and was nudged further towards Mozart than it wanted to go.
Perahia triumphed in his program-closer, Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Op 111. This sonata is a supreme challenge of musicianship that has consistently baffled the greatest pianists of this and the last century. It is an increasingly characteristic choice for Perahia as he turns to later Beethoven. He played the Hammerklavier Sonata last year in New York—the bootleg you can find on Youtube is a masterpiece. Perahia has become one of a handful of living musicians who can do justice to late Beethoven. Despite some technical lapses in his Op 111, and the jarring omission of a fractional phrase in the penultimate bar, he matched admirable forward-drive with an unusual degree of lyricism. Perhaps this is what Beethoven would generally sound like, had the last century of pianists followed Backhaus instead of Schnabel. Perahia’s interpretation of this sonata is finer than any that has been recorded. Carnegie says this performance wasn’t taped, which is rather tragic. Perhaps another public-spirited bootlegger was lurking in the audience.
If Perahia puts more romance than is typical into Beethoven, Pollini puts less romance than is typical in Chopin. This, too, is a good thing. Pollini has occasionally been criticized as cold or unemotional, which for all we know just means that he doesn’t burst into tears whenever he plays a nocturne. In this all-Chopin program, Pollini connected not only with the music, but with the audience and the hall itself: he is more flamboyant than Perahia, and his recital was a dialogue that involved us directly and vibrated with energy. His tempi were good and fast, and his own technical mistakes (most noticeable in the opening Op 27 Nocturnes) did not detract from his tremendous musicality.
The pinnacle of Pollini’s night was also the program-closer: Chopin’s own last piano sonata, Op 58. Chopin made his final contribution to the form twenty years after Beethoven. As Beethoven sounded the final triumph of a musical era, Chopin was busy inventing a new one—one that would ultimately turn out to be much worse. Romanticism was at its height right from the start, and Chopin put it there.
Pollini got five curtain calls and responded with an encore of the first Ballade. He got two more curtain calls after that, as the audience gamely tried to call him back to the piano. But as the gentleman next to me pointed out: “He’s tired. Let him rest.”
