Maurizio Pollini's recital at Strathmore last night was one of a limited number of appearances he is making in the United States this year, after Boston, Carnegie Hall, and Chicago. Thank you again, Washington Performing Arts Society! If you love the piano and its greatest repertory — by the twin masters of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin and Franz Liszt (the good and evil twin, respectively?) — you may not think that Pollini is necessarily the best interpreter of this music ("all intellect and no soul" is the most common criticism). You likely still admire Pollini and leapt at the chance to hear him play live. If you missed it, that is why DCist is here.

Pollini devoted the first half of his program to Chopin, particularly four of the nocturnes from his new CD, released last month. For the most part, the nocturnes are moments of quiet melancholy, and they do not correspond all that well to Pollini's optimal strengths. He played them with consummate grace, capturing the flights of fancy in the right hand of the F minor nocturne (op. 55, no. 1), delineating the soprano and alto voices (even when one is wildly trilling, something that is terribly difficult) in the E-flat major nocturne (op. 55, no. 2). As you would expect, he mastered the technical demands of the C minor nocturne (op. 48, no. 1), rendering the soaring melody over a complicated, pulsating chord accompaniment. Still, I had the sense of Pollini holding back a little at times, imposing restraint upon himself, and it may have throttled the performance slightly.

He certainly was more able to cut loose on the other two Chopin selections, bigger and more virtuosic. Pollini seems to react well to the pumping of adrenaline, the spontaneous challenge of something new, which is perhaps why he is sometimes more engaged and immediate during his lengthy encores than during the announced program. In fact, he played the G minor ballade (op. 23) as an encore during his last recital in Washington, and here it was again in the middle of the first half, somewhat deflated by comparison, although still extraordinary playing.

By far, the best piece was the one that concluded the first half, the F# minor polonaise (op. 44), which dazzled with booming thunder and delicate melodic moments. Some critics of this recital in other cities have wondered if Pollini is the right player for Chopin, that he does not apply enough rubato to his tempi and plays too rigidly. All major pianists play these pieces and endless amounts of individual nuances have been applied, stretching the music in all different ways. Listening to Pollini's Chopin, I had the sensation of looking at a Renaissance masterwork after a drastic restoration. All those layers of dust and varnish had been stripped away, and what we were hearing was Chopin's score without the accumulated crud.

In the second half, Pollini turned to the music of Franz Liszt, which turns out to be better suited to Pollini's mastery and strength. He opened with four vignettes, all composed late in Liszt's life and rather daring tonally. Programmatically, they told an interesting story together, unintended by the composer. Nuages gris (Gray clouds) and Unstern (Ill-omened) both make forays across the border into atonality, setting a tone of uneasiness for the future. In La Lugubre Gondola (Pollini played the first version, a dismal barcarolle), Liszt sets to music his premonition of the death of fellow composer Richard Wagner, felt as Liszt watched a funeral procession of gondolas in Venice. Liszt composed the last work of this sketch, Richard Wagner -- Venezia, shortly after Wagner actually died in Venice. Pollini brought an orchestral fullness to Liszt's evocation of the music of the Rhine River in Wagner's Ring cycle.

However, Pollini reserved the best for last, a magisterial and occasionally unhinged reading of Liszt's thorny Sonata in B Minor, composed in the 1850s. Liszt conceived this extraordinary sonata as one long movement, which still incorporates the sequence of ideas and tempi in a traditional sonata. However, the same set of themes are developed through a series of continuous variation throughout all of the "movements" or sections, culminating in a complex contrapuntal section that, in Pollini's performance, bordered on the tumultuous. All of the technical aspects are this pianist's forte: his scales whirred up and down without bumps, octaves and large chords romped loudly in rapid succession. It was a tour de force intellectually as well, making perfect logical sense of the form while at the same time Pollini's hands seemed possessed at times by a demonic force, impelling them onward, ratcheting up the speed.

The audience was appreciative enough to merit four encores, beginning with Debussy's architectonic prelude La cathédrale engloutie (The engulfed cathedral), a musical depiction of a story told in Breton legend about a mysterious cathedral that rises out of the ocean, bells ringing, and then sinks back into the water. Three other encores, all Chopin, gave the impression mentioned above, of a Pollini more excited by his encores than the actual program. The etude in C minor (op. 10, no. 12, known as the "Revolutionary") was nothing less than astounding.