Maurizio Pollini

Maurizio Pollini, who was born in Milan in 1942, studied piano with Carlo Lonati and Carlo Vidusso. He gave his first public concert in 1952, and his early career culminated in 1960 with his victory at the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. He subsequently continued his studies, taking additional lessons from Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Arthur Rubinstein. His friendship with Claudio Abbado and Luigi Nono also dates back to this period and led to his deep involvement with contemporary music. Since the mid-1960s, Pollini has appeared as a soloist in all of the major musical centers around the world, playing repertoire that ranges from Bach to Boulez, and he has collaborated with the most prominent conductors of our time. In 1995 he first introduced the “Progetto Pollini,” a series of concerts under his artistic direction featuring music from the Middle Ages to the modern era, which he presented initially at the Salzburg Festival and then internationally in subsequent years. LUCERNE FESTIVAL named him an “artiste étoile” in 2004 and engaged him to perform the “Pollini Perspectives” cycle in 2011-12, which coupled Beethoven with contemporary works. Pollini has received numerous awards for his recordings, including a Grammy for his account of Chopin’s Nocturnes. His most recent CD, which was released in January 2019, includes Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata as well as mazurkas and nocturnes. The filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon paid tribute to him with the documentary Maurizio Pollini: De main de maître, which appeared in 2014. Maurizio Pollini has been awarded the Siemens Music Prize, the Rubinstein Prize, the Premio Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale. He received the Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2012 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Madrid in 2013.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 26 August 1976 playing three sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven (Opp. 28, 57, and 106).

August 2019