Maurizio Pollini

Our award recipient has taught us throughout his career as an interpreter what classical music and “classicism” truly are. Classical is not necessarily the measured, unrisky, cosy and cautious Horatian golden mean. It’s something else entirely: great classical music offers a thrilling parallelogram of great opposing forces – from deathly stillness to great tumult.

Pollini knows how important silence is in music, and I would like to add a shattering Beethoven statement, a great concrete artistic sentence. Beethoven said: ‘Death could be expressed by a pause’. All this is part of the parallelogram of forces that great, living classical music presents to us. On blessed evenings, this parallelogram of energies, this balance between mastery and ecstasy, vitality and organic law, this adventurous classical music, emerges from the hands of Maurizio Pollini.