Maurizio Pollini's Piano Recital at Carnegie "Perspective Series"

Italian Pollini is a respected figure in piano world for his undefeatable and terrific accuracy musical memory and athletic piano performance. I was personally amazed at his recording of Three Movements of Petroushka composed by Stravinsky. I had been longing to watch/listen to his live performance since I've listen to that recording (to figure out how many fingers he has LOL). Last year fall, I was lucky enough to attend his solo recital in Carnegie Hall.


While the audience applauding, Pollini walked enthusiastically toward piano bench and then smiled and bowed to greet the audience. From his smile, he looks like an innocently charismatic person.

Pollini opened his recital with Beethoven Sonatas: Tempest Sonata, and Appassionate.I think his performance of the sonatas were energetic but steady and careful but fabulous.In short, he "rocks". However, the aria beginning of the Tempest Sonata first movement sounded a little unsure of himself. But of course, he didn't hit a single wrong note, so that makes his performance perfect in certain sense :) because maybe audience will agree that they don't pay that much of money to hear wrong notes. LOL

After the Beethoven pieces, he proceed with a set of Chopin's Mazurkas.It actually surprised me to find lyrical side of Pollini's performance. In fact, in my personal opinion, although I like Yundi Li's performance style in general, Pollini performed this set of marzurkas better than Yundi Li's (note: Yundi Li performed a different set of Chopin's Mazurkas earlier in his own recital at Carnegie)

Then Schumann's Fantasy were performed. This time though, Pollini sounded a little emotionally confused. Maybe he hit all the right note. I kind of lost myself in figuring what Schumann was trying to "express" through the piece.

Then his performance of virtuosic Chopin's Scherzo in b-minor was very athletic and robotic in general. His digital accuracy seemed carefully calculated. However, he seemed to ignore the atmosphere that the Scherzo conveys.

As a sincere gratitue to the audience's eager support (his recital tickets were all sold out), Pollini gave 3 encores to end the afternoon recital. They were Chopin's Nocturne (forgot the opus number, but my favorite one), Revolutionary C minor Etude,and Etude in C sharp minor. Please note, he played the etudes with "NO SWEAT". Looking at his appearance, he may be an old guy but he is definitely pianistically "fit".

Thoughts after Lang Lang's performance with New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center

Lang Lang is a real performer in Performing art field. He is sensitive to audience's who have unopened minds to classical music. If you want to draw a classical outsider's interest to classical music, you should bring that outsider to watch Lang Lang's performance. Classical music is like opera. For people who don't know anything about it, it is quite a pain to watch or listen to it.

Lang Lang, as a classical music "insider", he made an effort to reach audience who don't understand classical music with his extraordinary "body language". His extra-musical "choreography" transmit to audience messeges of a composer. Especially audience who are not sensitive enough to the meaning of certain arrangement of sound in classical music context. l as a classically trained pianist, frankly, was very much distracted by Lang Lang's unrelevant "extra musical choreography". However, I realized that Lang Lang has a respectable pianistic skills. As I closed my eyes, I still was able to perceive a descent interpretation of Beethoven's piano concerto by Lang Lang.

So, I must say that, Lang Lang, as a piano pieces performer, realistically realizes the difficulty of ordinary person in understanding classic music. And thus he creatively incorperates extra-musical choreography so that audience can understand a composer's work without sacrificing the quality of the real pianistic skills. So, Lang Lang does have a mind of "businessman" whom is sensitive to the need of different crowds and bring a different crowds to enjoy classical music. Or I should say he opens door of classical music to a very different field of audiences.

Not every classically trained pianists are brave enough to breaks this wall to convey a composer's artwork through unconventional way. I must say that most "well-respected" pianists, the pianists who won a lot of piano competitions are those who are not very creative at performing. Most of them are very much robot whom just do what was instructed, without a "creative mind" whichi, literally doesn't really belong to "performing art field". Art means creative, original. Dance is a performing art too. You can choreograph a dance. But why not a piano performing? If piano performing should be ideally doing what is instructed perfectly, piano performing should not be a performing art but a sport where the concerns is all about physical strength and intelligence at accuracy.

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