Umberto Benedetti Michelangeli News
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2024-04-24
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2024-04-15 03:30:00
3 Shades of Blue/Kind of Blue (Book/CD Review)
[…] three but other jazz luminaries as Kaplan weaves the three biographies into an overview of the development of different forms of jazz such as swing bebop, post-bop, cool jazz, modal jazz, harmolodics, and free jazz. But of special interest to fans of classical music might be to learn that all three of these jazz giants were influenced by classical music. For example, Kaplan writes that one piece that Miles almost became obsessed with was Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s 1957 recording of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G… Miles wanted to put wide-open space into his music the way Ravel did. He wanted to use different scales the way Khachaturian, with his love for Asian music, did… Davis told Evans that the new album he had in mind would make use of some of the Western classical themes they’d analyzed together…” Evans had been classically trained, but ultimately decided that he wanted to become […]
2024-01-08 16:07:00
Catching up, January 2024
This Week in Classical Music: January 8, 2024. Catching up. Last week we simply wished you a happy New Year, so this week we’ll try to make up for it and cover the first two weeks of the year. January 5th should be officially named Piano Day, as on this day three great pianists were born: Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, in 1920, Alfred Brendel, in 1930, and Maurizio Pollini, in 1942. Pollini still performs, but we stopped attending his concerts some years ago: he’s now just a shadow of his great self. This doesn’t diminish his prodigious talent that he brilliantly displayed for decades with virtuosity and incisive repertoire, which, unique to a pianist of his stature, included the music of many modern composers. (In comparison, the repertoire of his compatriot, the perfectionist Michelangeli, was very narrow). Two prominent Soviet cellists were born during these two weeks, Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, on January 6th […]
2023-08-26 02:11:41
SWR has brought out Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s 1956 Ludwigsburg Festival Mozart K. 450 and 466 performances that ICA originally released back in 2013. Reviewing Michelangeli’s EMI 1950 studio recording of K. 450, I wrote how the pianist “subjects each phrase to finely-tuned gradations of touch and dynamic scaling, leaving not one note unscrutinized and unaccounted […]
2022-07-04 06:06:00
Ravel: Concertos & Melodies (CD review)
[…] connection is evident early on in the concerto, but, as we might have expected, Ravel added his own suggestions of dreamy, Romantic impressionism to the mix. It is certainly one of Ravel's most-imaginative works, full of jazzy bustle one moment and a tender grace the next, and unless the pianist is careful, the piece can appear as merely a series of clamorous rants and fanciful gestures. In my book, nothing has beaten the recording Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli left us (EMI/Warner), but with pianist Tiberghien, the music is still magical.The old Pleyel piano may not be quite as rich or mellow as today’s Steinways, but it generates a glowing presence, and Tiberghien coaxes some persuasively seductive sounds from it. He’s particularly good in the quiet, languid parts, where his delicate touch enhances almost every note. This extends especially to the quiet Adagio assai (“very slowly”), where the central movement has never sounded […]
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