Maurizio Pollini, De main du maître – A Musical Profile

There were a host of excellent reasons for making a film portrait of Maurizio Pollini (born 1942): the greatness of the pianist, his extraordinary rarity – he is unknown, and inaccessible and, apart from the odd concert and very rare interviews, little exists about him, his affable nature and intelligence, the rich complexity of the topics addressed, not to mention the desire he himself expressed to submit to the exercise for the very first time – he was over 70 when the movie was made, he felt that it is time to allow himself to be filmed.

The film covers his musical experience, the people he has frequented (Luigi Nono, Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, etc), his repertoire (from Bach to Verdi, Chopin, Schönberg, Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen), and his political commitment. The film is made by one of the most experienced directors of music documentaries, the French Bruno Monsaingeon, known to us through many of his memorable films devoted to David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Sviatoslav Richter, Glenn Gould, Ghennadi Rozhdestvensky.