Prizewinning Pianist

At the opening of each session, the crystal chandeliers of Warsaw's elegant Philharmonic Hall were dimmed while a single spot focused for several reverent minutes on a bust of Chopin on stage. One slight, intense young pianist among the contestants at the sixth International Chopin Piano Competition seemed to resemble the master. At 18, the jury and audience agreed. Italy's Maurizio Pollini was clearly a pianist of the first rank. Last week Pollini became the first Westerner to win the coveted first prize of the Warsaw competition.

Normally held every five years (the schedule was interrupted during the war), the Chopin contest this year attracted 78 young pianists (age limit: 30) from all over the world. The 36-member jury, about half of whom were from the West, sat day after day in the balcony and deposited their secret ballots in a box to which the Chief of Justice of the Supreme Court had the only key. (Previous competitions have always been won by either a Pole or a Russian, and in 1955 there had been charges of political rigging.)

This year Pianist Pollini was clearly ahead from the start. Playing with deep concentration, lips parted and sharply profiled face tilted slightly upward, he worked his way through a selection of Chopin etudes, preludes and mazurkas, giving each of them beautiful tone and lyric line, crystalline clarity and virtuoso technique to burn. Said a judge after he played Chopin's E-Minor Concerto in the finals: "I don't think he missed a single note." The only criticism of Pollini was that his staggering technical facility and his octave-wide span sometimes tempted him into playing at too fast a pace.

When he learned that he had won the 40,000-zloty (about $1,700) first prize. Pianist Pollini called his home in Milan, shouted "I'm fine, I won," and burst into tears. The son of a prosperous Milan architect, Maurizio started piano lessons when he was five, at eight was hiding Bach partitas behind his school textbooks. He displayed a prodigious musical memory: at a piano examination at which students had three hours to memorize a two-page composition, Maurizio memorized ten pages in 15 minutes. Although he has won various piano prizes, Maurizio was not widely known when he set out for Warsaw. But his teacher. Carlo Vidusso of the Milan Conservatory, believed that he was ready. "Technically," said revered Artur Rubinstein, world's foremost interpreter of Chopin, "he already plays better than any of us on the jury."

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