Maurizio Bling

Maurizio Pollini's 2011 concert recording of Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor is an important document because it not only captures his return to playing with the esteemed Staatskapelle Dresden (his first performance with the group since 1986), and his first collaboration with conductor Christian Thielemann, but it presents the very work the pianist played at his Staatskapelle debut in 1976. All of this background is helpful to know, to understand the significance Deutsche Grammophon attaches to this release, even at the risk of offering a CD that runs just over 45 minutes, without any filler for added value.

This recording is clear, sharp and well-executed. The last two numbers with Katia Ricciarelli are stunning. She has a clear and lush voice with a dark, luminous quality that is finer than any clarinet. I could not get enough of her singing "Tanti affeti" at the end of the opera. What an incredible soprano. Certainly Joyce DiDonato is the current reigning Rossini mezzo but she (Ms. DiDonato) sings this at a slower tempo, with more ornamentation, perhaps to display her gifts better, though I think with less overall emotional impact.

Want to know what the two smartest musicians in Italy think of Bartók's first two piano concertos? Try this disc. With Maurizio Pollini at the piano and Claudio Abbado on the podium, the Hungarian modernist's concertos have never sounded so brilliant. Recorded in transparent stereo for Deutsche Grammophon in 1977, Pollini and Abbado's Bartók with the Chicago Symphony is searingly translucent in orchestrations that favor the winds, brass, and percussion over the strings and piano writing that encourages shock and awe virtuosity.

Maurizio Pollini, "the pre-eminent Chopinist of his generation" (Fanfare), continues his revelatory and chronological re-exploration of the Polish master's late works. This album contains the pianist's latest thoughts on Opp. 55-58 (1843/4), including the B minor Sonata and Berceuse.

This review is my celebration of two anniversaries. Composer Frederic Chopin was born 200 years ago, and this recording was made 50 years ago today. Chopin's piano concerto in F minor op 11, while carrying the number 1, was actually his second piano concerto. In any case it has always been my favorite of the two. The first maovement (allegro maestoso risoluto) contains a lenghthy (four minutes here) orchestral introduction and is by far the longest of the movements.

Maurizio Pollini's second Deutsche Grammophon release with Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden is a live concert recording of Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2, a fitting follow-up to his successful 2011 CD of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor. That recording marked Pollini's triumphant return to Dresden, but this 2013 recording is less about the significance of the concert and more about the consolidation of Pollini's working relationship with Thielemann and the orchestra.

Here's the kind of big-name, big-budget Mozart concerto recording that's not as common as it used to be. And lo, even one of the giants of contemporary pianism shows signs of having encountered the leaner approach of historical performances, and even of having absorbed them. Maurizio Pollini, best known for Chopin and the other lyric Romantics, conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from the keyboard.