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He joined the Italian Communist Party in the beginning of the so-called Years of Lead, a interval of political violence and social upheaval in Italy. He justified that call as a result of the party’s denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 allowed him to sq. doctrine with democracy. He was escorted from one in all his personal recitals for protesting the U.S. bombing of Hanoi, and he befriended the composer Luigi Nono, with whom he collaborated on works like “Como una ola de fuerza y luz,” devoted to the reminiscence of the Chilean activist Luciano Cruz.
Convinced that music was a proper for all, Mr. Pollini gave live shows for staff and college students with the conductor Claudio Abbado, a lifelong collaborator, and he deserted conventions that separated new music from previous, recording the piano works of Schoenberg as strikingly as he did the late sonatas of Beethoven. His fervor had dimmed by the Nineteen Eighties — “It was one thing of a letdown,” he subsequently mentioned of the interval — however he retained his socialism, together with an idealistic perception within the energy of artwork.
“Art itself, whether it is actually nice, has a progressive facet that’s wanted by a society, even when it appears completely ineffective in strictly sensible phrases,” Mr. Pollini instructed The Guardian in 2011. “In a means, artwork is a bit of just like the goals of a society. They appear to contribute little, however sleeping and dreaming are vitally necessary in {that a} human couldn’t reside with out them, in the identical means a society can not reside with out artwork.”
Mr. Pollini saved up with trendy artwork, learn all of Shakespeare repeatedly in English and Italian, and studied scores nicely past these for the piano. But he chosen what he carried out with care, committing solely to works that he knew he would by no means tire of, and that had contributed to what he noticed because the evolution of music.
Even so, Mr. Pollini was a modest modernist. Rarely seen with out a jacket, a tie and cigarettes, he spoke of his appreciation for musicians of antithetical persuasions, from the arch-Romanticism of the pianist Alfred Cortot to the regal grandeur of the conductor Karl Böhm, with whom he made beautiful recordings of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms concertos. Unusual for a modernist, he even confessed to listening to Rachmaninoff every now and then.
Mr. Pollini’s survivors embrace his spouse, Maria Elisabetta, generally generally known as Marilisa, whom he married in 1968, and their son, Daniele. Both his spouse and his son play the piano.
“We have probably the most lovely repertoire ever written for an instrument,” Mr. Pollini mentioned of pianists in an interview with The Times in 2006. “We have at our disposal a richness. And then we take care of an instrument that has a fully extraordinary chance. There aren’t any limits to what you are able to do on the piano.”
