These wonderful little pieces are works that you (probably) have to learn to love, but which can be loved nonetheless — and it certainly helps that Pollini plays them with intimacy and expressiveness. Though atonal, these pieces are nonetheless thinly swathed in the last vestiges of classical form and harmony: you can glimpse shades of lyrical melody, chordal accompaniments, ABA structure in the first piece, expressive appoggiaturas, pedal tones, and so on. Formally speaking there’s a vast (unimaginably vast) number of things that can be said about these three pieces, standing as they are at the very threshold of full-blooded modern serial atonality, but that’s not in fact that helpful if you want to just enjoy listening to these. So instead I suggest several ways of listening to these:
1. Three tableaux: a silent evening in a house soon to be demolished, a funeral, a fire swallowing a factory.
2. Five paintings: Picasso’s The Blue Room, Francis Bacon’s Head I / Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, Munch’s The Scream / Kandinsky’s Composition VII
3. Three preludes: a nocturne out of late Liszt, a Brahmsian intermezzo/lament, a piece out of Schumann’s Kriesleriana.
4. Three myths: Sisyphus, Dante, Zeus and Leda.
5. Music for films from the black-and-white era. Imagine whatever you choose.
00:00 — 1. Mässig
03:55 — 2. Mässig
11:09 — 3. Bewegt