CHOPIN: Etudes, Opp. 10 & 25 – Maurizio Pollini, piano – Testament

CHOPIN: Etudes, Opp. 10 & 25 – Maurizio Pollini, piano – Testament SBT 1473, 59:54 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi] ****:
At the 13 March 1960 grand final of the sixth International Chopin Warsaw Competition, piano legend Artur Rubinstein exclaimed of Maurizio Pollini (b. 1942), “That boy plays better than any of us jurors!”
Recorded in the course of eleven days at EMI’s Abbey Road Studio, 5-16 September 1960, this set of complete etudes has its first release from Testament. The contemporaneous recording of the E Minor Concerto with Paul Kletzki and the Philharmonia Orchestra retains its cult status among collectors. For unknown reasons, Pollini would not approve the official release of the Etudes, and by 1967, after a relatively truncated recording career at EMI, the artist and the recording company parted ways.
Peter Andry, who produced the recording of the Études, later recalled Pollini’s play-through of the first set: “Hearing him perform the first set of Chopin’s two complete sets of Etudes was a spine-tingling experience. This was pianism of the very finest kind. Rarely had I heard such perfection. He seemed to play these demanding works effortlessly. I remember the occasion even now as one of my greatest musical experiences.”
Already in the Op. 10 we can hear the rather hard patina Pollini favors, perhaps consonant with the fact that his own guru, Michelangeli, demanded much the same tone of his chosen instruments. The immediacy of fluency and stylistic poise strikes us; even the most knotty of Chopin’s syncopes and punishing finger placements slows the pianist down not one whit. The poetic temperament reigns in such masterpieces as the E Major from Op. 10, along with the fanciful G-flat Major and the more Lisztian F Minor Op. 10, No. 9.  Pollini takes the brilliant A-flat Major Op. 10, No. 10 at a breathtaking clip, its fluttering  figures having been granted the wings of Daedelus, ending with a diaphanous leggierissimo. Perhaps too metronomic, the limpid E-flat Major No. 11 lacks something of the poetry that others like Lhevinne could bestow upon its transporting stretches. The “Revolutionary” Etude, however, thunder and rockets its way into our collective consciousness, what Andry called “great rolling waves of sound coming from the grand piano.” 
The Op. 25 begins by Pollini’s softening the aural surface for that Aoelian harp effect the A-flat Etude demands. By far, Pollini’s sheer motor powers at eighteen were equal to any of the etudes, easily apparent in the F Minor Op. 25, No. 2. Pollini’s gallop for the F Major carries a suave flair that we found in Arrau’s EMI reading a decade earlier. Its quirkily impish companion, the No. 4  in A Minor, scampers and catapults forward in impulsively grand gestures. The E Minor appears to be just another problem of agogics, at least until Pollini addresses the soaring melos of its middle section, with Pollini’s bass particularly attentive to Chopin’s harmonic shifts. Mixed meters Pollini consumes in one gulp, as the G-sharp Minor Etude attests. The grandest, most tragic of the set, the C-sharp Minor, receives something by way of late Liszt, a lyrical meditation, in passing dissonant shadows, on our mortal coil. If young Pollini were capable of communicating true intimacy, it happens here. The tiny G-flat Major achieves an illumined transparency and pungent clangor rare in the annals of young people’s renditions. A powerhouse series of block chords, staccato, hurtle us through the opening pages of the B Minor, which Pollini transforms in to a grand ballade. The so-called “Winter Wind” Etude in A Minor plays like a miniature concerto, an existential toccata between warring forces, large and small, dark and light. Finally, the C Minor “Ocean” Etude, taken in heroic gestures, truly a “testament” to a young firebrand of the keyboard in the Arrau tradition but assuming his own sweeping mantle of pyrotechnical wizardry.
—Gary Lemco