Music Richard Osborne

BEYOND PERFECTION: ARTURO BENEDETTI MICHELANGELI

Beyond Perfection is the title of an absorbing new DVD about the great Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. Even in an age of unexamined hyperbole where the promotion of classical musicians is concerned, it seems a touch over the top.

Where language is concerned, I’m more an E M Forster kind of music-lover. You recall the manner. ‘Well, yes, if you press me, Michelangeli might have been the greatest of them all, at least among those pianists whose art and craft have been electronically preserved. Mind you, I speak only of his particular mix of fine musicianship and flawless technique. Nothing, you understand, to do with “interpretation”.’

Michelangeli abhorred that word, too. ‘He doesn’t “interpret” the music, he simply plays the notes; it’s a kind of black magic.’ Carlos Kleiber’s tribute to Herbert von Karajan might apply equally to Michelangeli.

Nor did he have any truck with the idea of perfection – ‘a closed circuit’, as he called it. A former seminarian, he believed that perfection means completion; that only God is perfect.

Michelangeli a seminarian? Indeed he was. It’s just one of many things he experienced or achieved before his 25th birthday in 1945.

These included graduating with high honours from the Milan Conservatory at the age of 13; a year in the Franciscan La Verna monastery (he never took his vows, but his training in the art of contemplation never left him); time as a medical student; and first prize at the 1939 Geneva Piano Competition, where comparisons were made to Liszt and Paderewski.

He began the Second World War as a pilot in the Italian air force and ended it an escaped partisan whose hands (so it’s said) had been beaten by the Germans.

His earliest recordings, made in Milan between 1939 and 1942, left (and still leave) connoisseurs slack-jawed with admiration. Miniatures by Spanish masters – Scarlatti, Albéniz, Granados and Mompou – were an early speciality.

There’s also memorable Bach and Beethoven from this time; and, after he resumed recording in London in 1948, a yet-to-be-surpassed account of Brahms’s hair-raisingly difficult Paganini Variations. All can be found on three expertly transferred, budget-priced Naxos CDS.

The piano sound itself married the lyric beauty of a Stradivari violin with an organ’s commanding peal. It’s a phenomenon that explains the crucial role pianos and piano-tuners played in Michelangeli’s career.

The last of these was Angelo Fabbrini, a man famous for taking Hamburg-built Steinways and turning them into something closer to a pre-1910 Blüthner – a piano of fabulous range and subtlety, less brash, more