Search - Isaac Albeniz, Federico Mompou, Enrique Granados :: Michelangeli Recital

COMPULSIVE

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 04/05/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Once bitten with the Michelangeli bug you stay bitten ever after.
These performances are from 1939-1942 when he was hardly more than a boy (born 1920). The recorded quality is not bad for its age, but it rules out a 5* rating, especially in the Chopin waltz, where there is a really weird background effect like somebody gargling. Michelangeli-collectors will not be put off by that, nor by the rather short measure the disc offers -- it would have been short for an LP let alone a CD. Music-lovers completely fresh to the work of this unique artist would probably be well advised to start with something in better sound, but I would not say that this disc is exclusively for collectors. You can still get a surprisingly good impression of that utterly unique tone-quality, even in Reflets dans l'Eau. Michelangeli's Debussy is very individual indeed, highly coloured, big in tone and about as unlike Gieseking or Richter as could well be. You would know who was playing immediately from the Albeniz Malaguena that starts the disc, and you will hear a marvellous bit of smouldering moroseness in the Granados Andaluza. The biggest item here is Chopin's B flat minor scherzo,
and M's great reading is quite similar to the studio recording he
made many years later. The end of the piece epitomises for me one aspect of his playing -- fast, tense, rhythmic, exciting, but not a hair out of place. The last note is the familiar high treble chord as I know it from the other two versions I have (Horowitz, Richter), not the unusual variant that he gives in the studio recording, an octave B flat in the bass played in quite phenomenally exact time. Unless you are a complete play-safer or sound-quality connoisseur I can recommend this wholeheartedly, certainly at the price."