Customer Reviews

Schumann: Carnaval; Brahms: "Paganini" Variations; Bach-Busoni: Chaconne

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Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli felt an obssesive fascination by these three piano works.
This Chaconne performing maintains the perfect balance between the mistery and the elusiveness, in fact Benedetti gradually increases the tension level to unexpected heights. I got the Busoni version with this piece and Michelangeli gets very very close in idiomatic expresiveness.
The Carnaval was his glorious triumph in the famous London Recital in 1957. He recorded it several times. And recently I got a new perfomance recorded in Lugano where he makes with this work an absolute journey to the purest romatic tradition and far beyond.
Finally the Paganini Variations was another battlehorse for this legendary pianist. Benedetti remarks the dark side of the score with notable wisdom, and accents as anyone else the charming and rapture lyrical mood that Brahms knew to use so well. It's very difficult to play any Brahms variation due you must be inmersed in the real intention of every variation.
This Remastered album is a reference must for any serious collector item of refined taste and sensibility.
An authentic file tresure!

To me, the real "Great Recordings" here are the Chaconne and the Paganini Variations, dating from 1948. Full of energy, impeccable, nuanced, the pianist caught in the geniality of his youth, who at the time was just resuming what would in the end result a brilliant career, interrupted at its beginnings by the war after his 1939 triumphs in Brussels. What the listener will encounter here is not only the rationality of Bach's conception clearly exposed as in very few other recordings, but also Busoni's masterly arrangement of it; I mean, you can hardly make your choice on whom to admire more, the composer or the arranger, so genially is Benedetti-Michelangeli's playing and exposition of the work. The Brahms is yet another example of a musician fully grasping the composer's so often overlooked romantic facet, nowadays consciously played down in favour of his "intelectual rigour" that in the end makes him dour if not boring. Expositions of Brahms's music such as this one, strong, vigorous, vivacious and full of feeling whilst preserving the composer's structures and form, will always be preferable to those who adopt slow speeds for their own sake and eschew the music's utter feeling because Brahms was a "serious" composer. Bravo here for Benedetti-Michelangeli.

I always found this particular, 1975 recording of Schumann's Carnaval a classic example of Benedetti-Michelangeli's capacity to both infuriate the listener and inspire admiration at the same time that characterises his life's later stages: as he grew older he became quirky and idiosyncratic, sometimes arbitrary, and this recording shows all that in coexistance with his consistently flawless playing and impeccable musicianship. The piano's sound as recorded is also somewhat "plummy" and artificial, with bass notes that don't at all sound lifelike, very much like was also present in the 1977 LP's. So, if the Bach-Busoni and the Brahms fully justify their inclusion in a "Great Recordings of the Century" series, let us say that the Schumann, particularly "Carnaval" rather qualify for a "Very Good Recordings of the Century" series.

Towards his final years, audiences the world over had got used to this behaviour, which not only showed in the treatment of the scores he played, his fastidiousness with his choice of pianos and their tuning, but also in the particular attitude he had in honouring his concert commitments, cancellations being more the rule than the exception. So at the time one had to rely more on his recordings than in his otherwise spectacular live presentations, which none the less always ran a high risk of cancellation. But then in the studio his idiosyncracies tended to win the day and producers seem to have let him got away with it ...

Michelangeli remains to this day a frustrating pianist. Here he can be heard in a good performance of Brahms' showy Paganini Variations. But, perverse as always, he mixes up the order! But why EMI chose to attach this fine performance to such dreadful Schumann amazes me. At times Michelangeli all but comes to a halt in some of the Carnaval episodes; for perfectly straightforward music the great pianist choses to adopt the most perverse slow motion. What this has to do with the music escapes me. The three Album pieces don't fare any better.

A perfect example of why everyone should be skeptical of these pumped-up titles, such as Recordings of the Century! Hit and miss doesn't begin to decribe what we have here - more like Beauty and the Beast!

If you want the Brahms then go ahead - just don't even consider buying this for the Schumann.

Michelangeli is of course a genius. Qualify this, however, with the specific rider "at playing the piano". There is no guarantee, ever, that he will give a musical performance of the music he chooses. Take this recording. Being a genius he must have thought: "I am a genius. I can do anything and people will shout with excitement." So he must have decided to play all the slow sections fast and all the fast sections slow. He must also pull the melodic lines around a bit, just to make sure you get the message. The result, I'm afraid, is one colossal mess. Schumann would turn in his grave. This is farce, fine music turned into vaudeville.
The Brahms is much better, but mono only, and of course these pieces are more in the nature of technical exercises.
Michelangeli re-recorded this work for DGG a couple of years later. Here he rescinded some of his extravagant manners, but as performance it still doesn't hang together. Add to this his Schumann Concerto recording (live) with barenboim - one of the worst performances of this work ever recorded - and you get the strong impression that Michelangeli was helpless with Schumann.