Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli: Live From Vatican City

According to Joachim Kaiser in his book “Grosse Pianisten unserer Zeit” (great pianists of our time), there is “among all the pianists in the whole world not one who takes such pains to perform for the sheer beauty of the music as Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli”. The career of ABM, as he was known, was frequently interrupted due to ill health and can best be documented through his public performances, which also form the nucleus of this compilation. Critics described his reading of Brahms’s Paganini Variations and the Bach Chaconne arranged by Busoni as “exemplary” and said that Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920–1995) had “set new benchmarks” with his recordings of Debussy, Ravel and Rachmaninov. In their book “Pianistenprofile”, a handbook of 600 pianists’ biographies published by Bärenreiter, Ingo Harden and Gregor Willmes describe ABM’s Scarlatti Sonatas as exhibiting “flawless, hitherto unsurpassed tonal perfection and harmony”. After first practising the piano with his father, ABM went in 1931 to study for three years at the Milan Conservatoire, where he graduated at 14. He then gave his first concerts and from 1938 taught piano himself, first in Bologna and later in Venice. In 1939 he won first prize at the Concours International d’Exécution musicale in Geneva, playing Liszt’s E flat major Concerto. In 1946 he embarked upon his first tour to the UK, followed by a tour of the USA culminating in 1950 in an acclaimed debut at Carnegie Hall. An illness of the respiratory tract then put his career on hold for quite some time. In 1965 Michelangeli founded his own music festival in Brescia and Bergamo, and he was its Artistic Director until 1969. A severe dispute with the Italian tax authorities ended his performing career there, and in 1988 he suffered a heart attack during a concert in Bordeaux which further greatly reduced his ability to perform in public. He gave his last concert in Hamburg in 1993.