Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli Recital
Program: SCARLATTI: Sonata in C Minor, K. 11; Sonata in C Major, 159; CHOPIN: Mazurka in G-sharp Minor, Op. 33, No. 1; Mazurka in B Minor, Op. 33, No. 4; DEBUSSY: Homage a Rameau (from Images, Book I); Preludes, Book I – Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, piano
EMI Classics DVD DVB 50189694
Video: 4:3; Black & White (1965) and Color (1978)
Audio: PCM Mono
Length: 68:37
Rating: ****
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920-1995), among the great luminaries of the keyboard, maintains a cult status proportionate to his immense color gifts, his special ability to defeat the percussive nature of the instrument and render interpretations of crystalline purity. The two Paris recitals captured here derive from 5 January 1965 and 2 October 1978, the latter of which includes the Debussy Preludes, Book I.
The concerts open with two Scarlatti sonatas, the music already in progress in Michelangeli’s face and slightly twitching mouth, as he watches those amazing, immense hands–beautifully manicured, almost quaffed–realize the stately figures of the C Minor and then the Spanish pulsations of the C Major, which have the pianist’s head shuddering in sympathetic rhythm. Stylistically, the music proceeds less like guitars than suspended bells, tolling evenly and briskly, the patina calm even above the sea of staccati syncopes.
The solo right hand of Michelangeli introduces the mazurka rhythm of the G-sharp Minor, but it is a veil, less concerned with proper Polish syntax than a personal, patrician meditation on a Steinway that has yielded to his digital charms. The B Minor proves most controversial: a veritable, six-minute tonepoem, the piece undergoes any number of gradations of pp even while Michelangeli’s hands are crossed. He then imposes his own sense of rubato upon the trio section in a way to make Celibidache envious–little wonder that most willful of orchestral leaders himself called Michelangeli “a conductor–he alone knows how to make colors at the keyboard.” The last of the 5 January 1965 group is Debussy’s Homage a Rameau, an extended song–or perhaps a combination of parlando and recitative–that has Michelangeli applying a most sensuous wash of sound upon the keyboard, even as the music assumes a stately resignation, a sigh for a world of noblesse gone by. What astound is the balance Michelangeli achieves between the padded and blurred colors he pedals and the steely detachment of his objectivity.
The pianist sits in a large, gilded room, bare except for the piano. For the Debussy Preludes, Michelangeli wears informal attire, his classic pullover, turtleneck, enamel vestment. But an austere picture he makes: chiseled, a bit thick in his features, his sound is even more sterling than in 1965, and just as carefully premeditated. True to Debussy’s intentions, the titles of the pieces are displayed after the performance of each. The Delphic Dancers undulate in a sea-world of color, stately, inspired, a mite possessed. Voiles becomes a study in wind chimes. “With rigor and caressing” say the composer’s instruction–to the letter! The first of the “wind” pieces–here on the plain–allows Michelangeli’s explosive, Lisztian persona some light-handed, pearly play. The Sounds and Perfumes of the Night Air enjoy a (Spanish) languor, hints at what von Sternberg’s films of Marlene Dietrich visualize. The Hills of Anacapri flitters, a nervous scherzo-nocturne in Technicolor, a collage of tumbling, Iberian effects. Des pas sur la neige–a nuclear wasteland: Burgess Meredith after he breaks his glasses in The Twilight Zone. Every progression–even those tinged with sweet regret–stabs Michelangeli in the cheek.
Whatever the West Wind “saw,” it required power and various dynamic adjustments to express, the camera almost intruding on Michelangeli’s hands as they whip through the repeated notes and bass block chords in staggering synchronicity. The Girl With the Flaxen Hair arrives, a simple plaint which Michelangeli molds with pregnant pauses. Digital finesse and humor for The Interrupted Serenade, marked by small explosions of color over the ostinati, but always interrupted before the Spanish melos can assert itself. Wagner a la Debussy, as the tides rise and ebbs over the Kingdom of Ys, Iseult’s homeland. Ascendant with the patient, nuanced, modal line, the Sunken Cathedral assumes a massive, kaleidoscopic power of light and shade, the huge trellises dripping with sea water. Puck scampers and muses, then frolics spontaneously and elecitrically, if Michelangeli’s poised colors can ever exhibit “freedom.” The last Prelude, Minstrels, asks for a nervous, humorous touch, and has Michelangeli enjoying his own sonority, moving slightly from side to side as the vaguely African blend of jaunty colors mix in delicate harmony. The little, mock-military impulse recalls the jockey-dancer in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, waving his hat in fond farewell to the dying Toulouse Lautrec.
— Gary Lemco
