Maurizio Pollini’s reputation as a fearsome intellectual and proponent of difficult contemporary music should, one would think, stand him in good stead as an interpreter of Beethoven’s theoretically forbidding Diabelli Variations, and if you regard the work primarily as a cerebral pianistic monument then you may enjoy this performance more than I did. On the other hand, if you look to the piece for its warmth, wit, inventive profligacy, and expressive variety, then there’s little to whet the appetite here. To be sure, Pollini’s in excellent technical form: his fingers fly nimbly over the keyboard (Variation 23’s Allegro assai provides an excellent case in point), and there’s less of the clattery hardness to his tone that disfigured his recent Chopin and Debussy recordings. He also generates some real forward momentum as each variation follows hard upon the one preceding. But there’s so much more to this music than mere digital dexterity reveals.
As so often seems to be the case these days, Pollini’s playing features an almost mechanical stiffness that produces a kind of Brechtian “alienation effect”, or at least its musical equivalent. He bangs through Variation 22 on Mozart’s “Notte e giorno faticar” with grim force and nary a shred of humor; his Fughetta offers the glacial desolation of the finale of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony; and the emotional core of the work, Variation 31, is indeed Largo, but “molto espressivo”? I think not. Pollini’s at his best in the more etude-like variations: No. 26, for instance, which becomes a gorgeous study in cool bell tones. Elsewhere, his evident desire to emphasize each variation’s harmonic relationship to Diabelli’s tune leads to tedium. I’ve never been so conscious of the fact that many of the variations reproduce the 4 + 4 + 8 bar structure of each half of the theme by marking the harmonic changes with a loud chord followed by some zippy keyboard work: BANG scamper scamper scamper, BANG scamper scamper scamper, etc. Pollini heightens the monotonous impression by operating essentially at three volume levels only: very loud, very soft, and somewhere in between.
There are many fine performances of this work: Schnabel’s, which is about as far from Pollini as you can get in its ability to personalize each variation (Pearl); Arrau’s typically grand, golden-toned, dark-tinged but never lethargic view (Philips); Maria Yudina’s improvisatory wildness (Russian Disc or Philips); and Sokolov’s highly regarded, remarkably intense live recording for Opus 111. Scherbakov’s recent version for Naxos has a lot going for it too, offering technical poise and a fair amount of expressive nuance. I suppose that, in a sense, Pollini is a victim of his own success. There was time when listeners seemed ready to accept his interpretive coldness in exchange for the remarkable technical precision of his playing. Today his digital dexterity, while often still impressive, finds its equal (or superior) in any number of young pianists, and his increasing expressive rigidity pays fewer and fewer artistic dividends. The aesthetic point of a set of variations is the demonstration of unity in variety. Pollini offers only half the equation.
