Pianist and professor still a born Romantic

For world-renowned artist Daniel Pollack, it’s all about moving the audience

By JUSTIN CHANG
Lifestyle Editor
It has been less than a year since I first met Daniel Pollack, and it's strange, after only five minutes of obligatory reintroduction, how familiar the conversation suddenly seems.

Aside from the fact that we are now speaking on the telephone a speakerphone, actually, which leads him to punctuate every other sentence with a concerned "Can you still hear me?" his voice is the same. Deep but not droning, slow but possessed of a graceful rhythm; the pauses and longueurs perfectly balanced by the measured articulation of his speech.

He is still the same Daniel Pollack. The same internationally celebrated classical pianist, the same peerless professor who held offices at Juilliard and Yale before landing at the USC Thornton School of Music, the same man who could extract lyricism from a charred log if he set his mind and fingers to it.

Not much has changed in a year, and there's something deeply reassuring about that.

"I've been touring a great deal, particularly in Western and Eastern Europe," Pollack said. "I was recently on a jury in Kiev (for) the Vladimir Horowitz International Piano Competition ... then I have a sabbatical in the spring semester ... and a new CD will be coming out next spring ... "

In other words, business as usual for the always-in-demand Pollack. He spends most of his time flying from concert to concert, competition to competition, his itinerary as diverse as the pool of students privileged to call him their teacher.

What liberates him from the potentially numbing strictures of his routine, now more than ever, is the fire and spontaneity of his music.

"It's a very personal, creative undertaking electrifying, passionate and everything else. The thing about a live performance (is that) things happen that are created at the moment," he said. "And that's the excitement."

The word is entirely appropriate. A Pollack performance is a spectacle in itself, a riveting collision of ideas and emotions, droll and dynamic, forceful and delicate, that constantly challenges and expands accepted notions of what music should be. His prodigious technical mastery, ignited by a soaring lushness that seems to fight against the very rigors of technique, is perfectly suited to the romanticism that Pollack feels is "very much at the heart of the piano repertoire that I adore."

That repertoire will be on full display at his Sunday concert on campus, a veritable paean to the Romantic movement that includes works by Bussoni, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Schumann and Scriabin. Pollack ticks off these names with all due reverence for their prominence and artistry, but lingers over his descriptions of their pieces, as though by doing so he can channel their very spirits. Few pianists have appeared quite as respectful of their source material, or quite as comfortable with it.

Take his commentary on Chopin's intimidating Polonaise Fantasie, which at once says everything about the piece and absolutely nothing but leave it to Pollack to fill in the rest at Sunday's program.

"It's one of his most mature, unusual, far-reaching pieces, because it combines the strong rhythm of the polonaise and the idea of the fantasie," he said. "It's a work probably written 50 years before its time."

This regard for the significance of the composer's intention an element that many artists will gladly subjugate to their own excesses is surpassed only by his regard for his audience. Pollack is the sort of performer who derives satisfaction not only from creation, but from the assurance that the creation has been received and appreciated.

"I feel it's a tremendous responsibility as a performer to elicit this emotion from the audience, no matter what I'm playing," he said.

Accessibility, perhaps, explains not only his unabashed adoration of the Romantic repertoire, but also his willingness to embrace his instinct at any cost, even if it means straying from dictated rhythms. It is a tendency that sticklers for accuracy whom Pollack scornfully dismisses as "safe" performers might be quick to criticize.

"Music is not a metronome. Music doesn't move vertically," he said. "You get a lot of what I call Xerox-copied performances. They're just manufactured and played the same way. Do I get an emotional message from the performer? If I don't, then I'm not interested."

Certainly artists have always scoffed at their detractors as a means of defense but if anyone has truly earned the right to dismiss criticism, it's Pollack, who in 40 years of bravura performances has received nothing but the most glowing enthusiasm.

Repertoire magazine hailed his groundbreaking Complete Solo Piano Works of Samuel Barber as a work of "illuminating and sensuous pianism ... dominates and towers over the competition from now on."

The album went on to receive a Grammy nomination.

And WQXR, the New York Times' classical-music station, dubbed Pollack "one of the few remaining pianists today with a sublime link to the golden age of piano."

There is more truth to that rave than exaggeration. During his days at the Juilliard School, Pollack was under the instruction of the legendary Rosina Lhévinne, herself a friend and colleague of Rachmaninoff. To consider the sheer caliber of the instruction and musicianship flowing from one genius to the next is to understand why Pollack feels such a unique attachment to the composers he loves and to acknowledge that as long as he teaches, the "sublime link" may very well continue.

"When I hear a young, exciting talent Š you know you're in the presence of something happening," he said.

But it's a measure of Pollack's maturity, and his respect for individual distinction, that the last thing he either wants or needs is a clan of miniature Pollack clones. Unlike teachers who are wont to impose their own narrow concept of what constitutes art, he devotes himself to cultivating a student's own intrinsic vision however different in shape or form it may be from his own.

"I feel there's many interpretations possible of any work, as long as it's convincing," he said. "(There are) pianists who are cerebral, the academic, intellectual type; there's the technical kind, who are busy moving a lot of fingers real quickly; and those who play with heart and soul. The emotional content, to me, is the most important."

It's almost exactly the same thing he said last year and fortunately, some truths never change.

Daniel Pollack performs at 4 p.m. Sunday at Alfred Newman Recital Hall, located on campus. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.danielpollack.com.

Copyright 2001 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 144, No. 47 (Thursday, November 1, 2001), beginning on page 8 and ending on page 10.