Maurizio Pollini, pianist, political activist and uncompromising champion of modernism

One critic, after a severe recital, called him ‘the Hosni Mubarak of pianists’, but others admired his refusal to be ‘user-friendly’

Maurizio Pollini, who has died aged 82, was an Italian pianist celebrated for his lyrical but restrained interpretations of 19th-century composers; he was no less conspicuous for his championing of contemporary music, including that of such notoriously tricky composers as Boulez and Stockhausen.
He was a particular favourite of London audiences, making regular appearances in the capital, culminating in the Pollini Project in 2011 – five sold-out recitals at the Festival Hall in which he demonstrated the extraordinary breadth and depth of his repertoire, from Bach to Luigi Nono. 
That series was not to every critic’s taste, with one describing him as “the Hosni Mubarak of pianists” after a particularly severe rendition of Bach. But to Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph there was “something wonderfully refreshing about an artist who refuses to be user-friendly”.
Pollini rose to fame after winning the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1960 at the age of 18, the first Italian pianist since Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli to achieve a truly international reputation. A distinguishing feature of his interpretations of Chopin, as well as other 19th-century composers such as Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven, was his combination of limpid lyricism, cascading brilliance and a lucid and cerebral rationalism.
Psychologically, Pollini was an enigma, as prone to Left-wing rabble-rousing as he was to building intellectual musical arguments. He was notoriously hard to interview. One journalist recalled that he had been left to conduct a virtual monologue in order to extract the odd precious monosyllable in reply; another compared Pollini’s attitude to that of a dentist’s patient who needs reassuring that the extraction will not hurt; while a third noted that his every utterance would begin with a quick tap of his ever-present cigarette.
For one of the most celebrated – and cerebral – pianists in the world, with seemingly limitless technical powers, Pollini was also a noticeably nervous performer, sometimes inclined to rush his pieces so giddily that audiences felt they had been treated not only to touches of the sublime, but also to glimpses of the abyss. At other times his monastic seriousness was almost icy, a “pianist who represents computer-like total control,” noted the critic Harold C Schonberg. Nevertheless, Pollini seemed to reach the soul in a way that defied rational analysis.
He argued that contemporary music should be just as familiar to mainstream concert audiences as the 19th-century classics, and regarded it as the performer’s “absolute responsibility” to put new music in their programmes to break down the audience’s prejudices. “I find the only interesting works are those composed in an uncompromisingly modern musical language – as Beethoven’s was in his time,” he once explained. In his later career Pollini would often programme Boulez, Webern and Nono alongside works by Mozart and Beethoven.
His own empathy with modernism could, perhaps, be traced to his early childhood in Milan where he was born on January 5 1942. His father, Gino Pollini, was a noted Italian rationalist architect of the 1930s, one of the “Group of Seven” who tried to bring modernism to Italy. A maternal uncle was the abstract sculptor Fausto Melotti. Both his parents were musical and encouraged their son’s interest in modernism in all its forms.
He claimed not to have done much practice when he was young. Nevertheless his progress was extraordinary: he made his public debut at the age of nine and was giving recitals by the age of 11. He studied piano first with Carlo Lonati, until the age of 13, when he was withdrawn from normal schooling, put under a private tutor and sent to study with Carlo Vidusso.
Nobody who knew Pollini was surprised when, at the age of 18, shortly after he had enrolled at the Milan Conservatoire under Michelangeli, he won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Arthur Rubinstein, chairman of the jury, famously declared: “That boy can play the piano better than any of us.” He was the youngest of 89 competitors.
But Pollini was unprepared for fame and for some years he struggled to match public expectations. There were illnesses, cancellations and chronic pre-concert nerves. In 1963 his British debut brought scathing reviews: “The impression left by his playing was that he was due to catch the 9.05 from Waterloo,” one reviewer complained.
After that, Pollini disappeared from the concert scene for several years, returning to his studies under Michelangeli and taking lessons from old hands such as Rubinstein in how to deal with nerves. He emerged again in London in 1968 to play a triumphant concert of Chopin’s 24 Etudes which left the reviewers almost lost for words. He made his American debut in 1968 and his first tour of Japan in 1974. He also began to record and to make a name for himself as a champion of Boulez and Stockhausen.
In the 1970s he acquired a reputation as a champion of art for the masses, performing in Italian factories with the conductor Claudio Abbado, with whom he was also a favourite in the concert hall. “Our idea was that art should be at the disposal of everybody: we wanted to find a new public,” he recalled.
On one occasion he caused a stir during the Vietnam War when he read an anti-US manifesto at the start of a concert and was hissed by the audience. After a bruising encounter at the Edinburgh Festival, John Drummond declared that “there is nothing so imperious as a rich card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party,” before adding: “Yet what a musician!”
Pollini’s repertoire was extraordinarily wide. He frequently performed – and recorded – Bach and Mozart as well as early modernists such as Prokofiev and Bartók. In the 1974 centenary celebrations of Arnold Schoenberg’s birth, he played programmes encompassing that composer’s complete piano music in several major centres and later recorded the entire body of his work. 
In 1972 he gave the world premiere of Nono’s Como una ola de fuerza y luz, and recorded the work. He was an enthusiastic advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, supposedly the most difficult of all piano pieces, and championed Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X, which he played wearing gloves to protect his hands from laceration in its note-clusters and savage glissandos.
He was addicted to both caffeine and cigarettes, famously refusing to observe Britain’s ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces, even in the smartest of London hotels. Although his political utterances grew rarer, in 2010 he threw up his hands in despair when asked by The Daily Telegraph about Italian politics. “Berlusconi is a total disaster,” he said. “Italy has many beautiful and strong things, but politics is not one of them.”
In 1968 he married Maria Elisabetta Marzotto, with whom he had a son.
Maurizio Pollini, born January 5 1942, died March 23 2024