Maurizio Pollini

In 2010/11 Pollini brought his personal vision to the concert hall for The Pollini Project - a highly acclaimed five recital series at the Royal Festival Hall, London - which took the audience on a journey through the development of piano music from Bach through late Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin, to Boulez and Stockhausen.

Maurizio Pollini has a broad repertoire ranging from Bach to contemporary composers and has recorded works from the classical, romantic and contemporary repertoire to worldwide critical acclaim. His recordings of the complete works for piano by Schoenberg, and of works by Berg, Webern, Manzoni, Nono, and Boulez, are a testament to his great passion for music of the 20th century. 

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“Nowhere was this more so than in No 11 in the set, in which the swirling dexterity and pulsating rhythmic drive of the A minor Winter Wind study seemed to leave the 19th-century behind and vault forward into the 20th. This was a Chopin recital of the highest seriousness, with Pollini the right man for the occasion, making an irresistible case for Chopin as one of the greatest of all musical innovators.” (The Guardian, March 2010)

“As his last couple of London recitals have demonstrated, Maurizio Pollini is on magisterial form at the moment, and this carefully planned Chopin sequence, grouping together the works of Opp 34 to 36 with Op 38, provides a document of this golden period in his playing career. He has recorded the two major works here, the second Ballade and the B flat minor Sonata before, but both of these are titanic performances, full of perfectly focused power and high-tensile lyricism... On this kind of form, Pollini has few pianistic peers in the world today.” (The Guardian, October 2008)

“Pollini's interpretative authority and transcendent technique are well known. What is significant here is the way in which he fine-tunes these to the very special demands of the Nocturnes… These are readings that take the long view, are unconcerned with immediate gratification, and bear much repeated listening. Only a great artist can reconcile opposites in the way that Pollini achieves here. He attends to Chopin's exquisite musical surfaces while sounding their depth.” (International Record Review, 2005)