Here is my Tuesday October 14, 2008 suntimes.com piece on the piano programs of The University of Chicago Messiaen Festival and Maurizio Pollini's October 12, 2008 recital at Chicago's Orchestra Hall.
A movable pianistic feast with Pollini, Taylor, and Hill
BY ANDREW PATNER
There are composers who were drawn to the keyboard to create melodies they hoped would become timeless. Others who used its five to eight octaves to work out harmonic, rhythmic, or mathematical puzzles or patterns. And there are those who saw the piano as a means to pour out the contents of the heart and the soul, whether in the cause of love or worship or to express general passions that could not be contained by words.
This weekend offered overflowing showcases of composers who used the piano to reach ecstatic heights. Three quite different keyboard masters -- the young American Christopher Taylor, the celebrated Italian Maurizio Pollini, and the British scholar-pianist Peter Hill --- gave can't-miss recitals at Roosevelt University's Ganz Hall, Mandel Hall in Hyde Park, and Orchestra Hall downtown. It was a movable pianistic feast.
The University of Chicago's superb 10-day Olivier Messiaen Festival presented two of the programs as it drew to a close: Taylor's ever-astonishing performance -- from memory -- of the composer's 1944 two-hour, 10-minute solo work Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus") on Friday night, and Hill's equally expert and spellbinding hourlong recital-discussion Saturday evening of Messiaen's use of birdsong in his compositions throughout his long life.
Sunday afternoon brought Pollini, now 66, back to Orchestra Hall for a chronological survey of early and middle period Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin works ending in a lengthy set of three Chopin encores.
What a listener brought away from all three programs was not excess, though, but the role that care, detail, and attention play in building up lengthy works or combinations of work. It was as if, through seeing the sculptor's work, we appreciated the sculptures even more.
All three gentlemen are fearsome intellects with strong interest in mathematics and language as well as -- or perhaps related to -- music. But their personal presentations could not be more different. Taylor (left) comes across initially as the earnest young professor (he is one, of piano performance, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison) who starts off demonstrating his smarts -- without ego -- and then loses himself physically in the work.
A Chicago musician friend says that he does not consider a performance of the Vingt regards to be a success if the piano is still standing at the end of the program. Taylor certainly did his part to give the Steinway a Glenn Gould-like workout, but it was his total identification with Messiaen's various and ever interconnected means of expressing religious ecstasy that carried and held the day. Pounding chords, eerie tritones, and tinkling celestial "voices" always came across as a captivating argument for faith, fantasy, and reason.
Hill (left) is more the shy British don who agrees to sit down at the piano only "if you insist." But once there, the tall white-haired Briton erased his sheepish smile and seemed to cast himself into a trance, one that very soon had the audience in its spell as well. Here, from the man who literally wrote the book on Messiaen and birdsong (as well as, with Nigel Simeone, the first major biography of the composer based on full access to Messiaen's own papers) was a survey from the self-styled ornithologist's first depiction of a bird in music, "La Colombe" ("The Dove"), from his Préludes of 1928-29, through his great Catalogue of Birds from 1956-58 to his late Little Sketches of Birds of 1985.
Hill has demonstrated that, despite Messiaen's claims, the composer's compositions were not literal transcriptions. But as he both talks about and plays the pieces, he shows that they were in fact more real artistically than a recording, just as a great poem exceeds a word-for-word re-creation of a lover's stuttering declaration. Along the way, Hill also gave us a rare demonstration of the only remaining example (1934) of Messiaen's fiendishly difficult but so expressive and powerful piano sight-reading exercises devised for students at the Paris Conservatory.
Pollini (left) will always divide his audiences between those who are touched by his ice and those who seek out more fire. Moving across the stage like a Milanese banker or businessman, he made perhaps his strongest case for musician as X-ray technician by showing just how moving Beethoven's "Tempest" (No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2) and "Appassionata" (No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57) sonatas can be if they are treated with a selfless precision that allows them to make their own musical arguments.
After intermission, Pollini brought his modernist sensibility to those seemingly untamed and untamable Romantics, Schumann and Chopin. Schumann's great C Major Fantasy and Chopin's blistering Second Scherzo saw rare memory slips from this titan, but even their occurrence, and his means of rescuing himself, seemed a part of the point here; these are works that take a man-made instrument and try to push it as far as possible while still being able to communicate the composer's intention. The Four Mazurkas, Op. 33, were both gems and shards of philosophy.
In the last few years, Pollini has started to revel in encores. He's not as extreme as Evgeny Kissin, of course, but he's not at all parsimonious, either. Sunday's were Chopin's E-Flat Major Nocturne, Op. 9, No. 2, the C-sharp Minor Etude, Op. 10, No. 24 and the First Ballade, G Minor, Op. 23, any of which would take an honorable place on any announced program. Like Taylor and Hill, like Messiaen, perhaps Pollini was saying that there was just no way to let go.
