Maurizio Pollini at Royal Festival Hall

Schumann
Arabeske in C, Op.18
Fantasie in C, Op.17

Chopin
Mazurka in C-minor, Op.56/3
Barcarolle in F-sharp, Op.60
Scherzo No.1 in B-minor, Op.20

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

Maurizio Pollini was back in London – following a year of ill-health and cancellations. His programme was all familiar repertoire, and there was a large audience to welcome the eighty-one-year-old artist, one of the very great pianists who still plays a huge role in forming the taste of three generations of music-lovers – particularly where Chopin, Debussy, Schubert and Schumann are concerned. Playing his Steinway-Fabbrini instrument, with its lovely, ambiguous lower register, he opened with Schumann’s Arabeske, with Pollini’s direct line into the music’s face-off between sweet romance and pensive anxiety: that rare gift of reflecting content back to listeners in a way that flatters us and deepens our perceptions seemed undimmed.

Then things went badly awry. He just couldn’t find his way into Schumann’s Fantasie, and after two attempts he went off-stage to get his score. There followed a muddle of a technician trying to fix up the piano’s copy holder, with Pollini then trying to keep the show on the road, but fumbled page-turns, losing his way, long silences, going off-stage again, applause in the wrong places, all took their toll. And inevitably the vital, secure link between performer and audience was broken. The audience was supportive and affectionate, but you wondered how he would recover.

There was a page-turner for the second half, but there was something too dogged and unyielding about the way he negotiated the technical demands and big gestures of Chopin’s Scherzo No.1. Growth, attack, tone and definition stayed stubbornly at the same level, and the way Chopin transfigures the progress of the Barcarolle from a brief journey in a gondola into an emblem of life’s passage struggled to register. Clouds of pedal and missed notes didn’t help. The recital ended around nine o’clock, and despite rapturous applause and a heartfelt standing ovation, there were no encores. I was standing near the stage when Pollini emerged through the door and briefly stood there for his fourth curtain call. He looked like a ghost.