The Pollini Project: Chopin, Debussy, Boulez, Royal Festival Hall, June 28, 2011, by Gabriel Kellett
The Pollini Project – Chopin, Debussy, Boulez
Royal Festival Hall
June 28, 2011
Fryderyk Chopin: 24 Preludes, Op. 28
Claude Debussy: from Préludes Book 1:
II Voiles
III Le vent dans la plaine
IV 'Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir'
VI Des pas sur le neige
VII Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest
X La cathédrale engloutie
Pierre Boulez: Piano Sonata No. 2
Maurizio Pollini, piano
This was originally intended to be the penultimate programme of Pollini's five-concert Project spanning the gamut of keyboard repertoire from Bach to Boulez (albeit with a large Classical Period-sized gap), but has been postponed for a couple of months due to illness. In my opinion this has made for a more fitting end to the series, not only following chronological order but also concluding by challenging the audience with something 'modern' rather than the obvious crowd-pleasing Chopin of what became the fourth Project concert. Appropriately, this concert in fact draws a connection, perhaps not immediately obvious, between the hugely different Chopin and Boulez. As maybe the first composer to make the sustaining pedal of vital importance in all his piano music, and one famed for the delicacy and sensitivity of his playing, Chopin is clearly an important precursor of Debussy's conception of the piano as 'an instrument without hammers'. In turn, Debussy's interest in timbre and non-functional harmony for their own sake can be seen as the start of the process of emancipation from diatonicism and structural norms that eventually led to Boulez's total serialism of all the individual elements of music, as might be surmised from his championing of Debussy in concert and on record.
