Bravura in the Coop

In his bachelor pad in Germany, Pianist Michael Ponti sometimes practices for ten hours at a stretch. In Frankfurt, an upstairs neighbor registered disapproval of the noise by dropping bowling balls on the floor, and finally sought other quarters. In Wiesbaden, the ten chickens who lived in an oversized coop behind the house suffered in silence until one day they simply quit laying eggs. Ponti then had all ten killed and ate them, after which he moved his piano into the coop. "It's a fine studio," says Ponti, "and the acoustics are simply marvelous."

Neither the neighbor nor the chickens were very good critics. For Ponti, at 34, is one of the most striking--if somewhat controversial--keyboard talents to appear on the concert stage in years. With a flair for the old-fashioned bravura style and a staggering technique to put it across, he is a one-man tidal wave of sound. His hands can hammer out octaves with machine-gun speed and force. He can pounce on flawless trills from a three-foot distance. He can zip off glissandi in octaves and double notes that would tear the fingernails of many pianists. Occasionally, when he decides to program a piece that demands it, he can even play sweetly and with charm.

Last week Ponti began a recital at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall with a Beethoven sonata at 7:50 p.m. By 8:20 he had flung himself into one of the fiercest challenges in the entire piano literature: both books of Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Paganini. He continued with Chopin's powerful Sonata in B Minor, another sonata by Scriabin, a wrist-cracking Etude for the Left Hand by Blumenfeld, and finally Stravinsky's Three Scenes from Petrouchka, a piece that bristles with so many notes that much of it is written on three and even four lines instead of the usual two. He wrapped up the evening with two encores.

Chinese Menu. It was a far less gaudy finale than Ponti had provided for his New York debut in March. Then the audience had been given a written list of the pianist's repertory of 48 flamboyant encores and invited to select their favorites, Chinese menu-style: one from Group A, two from Group B, and soon.

By 11:00 that evening, the first exhausted listeners were trickling dazedly out of the hall, but Ponti was still up there flailing away. He finally finished nine of his 48 pieces at 11:20 p.m., 20 minutes after the theater crew had gone into expensive overtime.

Such pyrotechnics--and endurance--developed slowly. Born in Germany, the son of a German mother and an American father, Ponti was brought to America in 1939 when he was 1 1/2 years old. His father went to work as a consular official for the State Department, his mother taught German at the University of Maryland, and Michael thumped away at the piano.

By age eleven, he had memorized all 48 preludes and fugues of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and had played them in public. "I even had two flings at New York," he recalls: "Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and the big Chopin competition of the Kosciuszko Foundation. I didn't play very well that day. They told me I had no technique and no promise and to go home."

Instead, Ponti went to Germany and enrolled at the Frankfurt Conservatory. There he began his penchant for marathon practicing--but only of actual compositions. "I never did exercises and scales in my life," he says. "I'm not even a particularly good sight reader. There's no secret to my technique: I just work hard and play the literature."

In 1968, after having earned a solid reputation as a recitalist in European cities, Ponti broke into recording in a characteristically lavish way. Vox Records wanted to record what seemed like the whole of the romantic piano literature and asked Ponti to be the performer. Since then he has made 25 LPs, including the complete piano music of Tchaikovsky, and is now working on Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. Largely as a result of this extensive background, he now has enough solo pieces in his head to turn out a six-hour nonstop recital. In addition, he can play any of 50 concertos at the drop of a hat. Or a bowling ball.

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