Pianist Maurizio Pollini can turn the most unassuming miniature into an epic experience. He opened his Royal Festival Hall recital with Chopin's Nocturne, Op 32 No 1, and after a lyrical, major-key melody, the music collapsed into a darker harmonic region. His playing of the recitative-like lament before the minor-key ending had the intensity of high tragedy. It was as if he had opened up an ambiguous emotional world, stripping away the veneer of salon-music convention. It was a fitting beginning to a concert that Pollini dedicated to his friend and compatriot, composer Luciano Berio, who died two weeks ago.
Pollini is famed for his intellectual command of the repertoire, and the rest of his all-Chopin first half demonstrated his prowess in a selection of the composer's largest-scale pieces. The Op 60 Barcarolle was built up as a sequence of shimmering waves, each more imposing than the last, and he transfigured the lyricism of the Third Ballade into a granite-hewn edifice in a performance that combined musical fantasy with structural purpose. But it was in the C sharp minor Scherzo that Pollini gave full rein to his pianistic powers, culminating in a coda that was technically faultless and emotionally overwhelming.
Yet there was more to Pollini's Chopin than architectural severity. The Op 57 Berceuse was a gentle lullaby, in which he seemed to improvise a series of variations on a simple, repeated bassline. The First Ballade, played as the last of four encores, had the same spontaneous brilliance, encapsulating the combination of integrity and freedom that makes him such a complete interpreter of this repertoire.
He brought the same qualities to Debussy's Second Book of Preludes. Each piece explores a pianistic technique to conjure a series of fantastical images, from the murky Fog of the opening prelude to Ondine, the water sprite. Pollini's magical performance gave life to Debussy's colourful menagerie through its clarity and control, rather than through superficial pyrotechnics.
The final Feux d'Artifice was the exuberant climax of the cycle. There were equally deft realisations of dancing fairies, in the fourth prelude, and of the eccentric General Lavine, in which Pollini added his own idiosyncrasies to Debussy's warped melodies: his gruff, impromptu vocal line heightened the music's wit and drama. Playing with barely any pause between the 12 pieces, Pollini gave a symphonic sweep to the whole set - more evidence of the alchemical fusion of intellect and poetry in his playing.
