Nutty Michelangeli Plays Debussy
The virtuoso Italian classical musician Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920-1995) is considered one of the 20th century’s great pianists. Critic Harold C. Schonberg once wrote of him, “His fingers can no more hit a wrong note or smudge a passage than a bullet can be veered off course once it has been fired.” Michelangeli had a reputation as something of a nut, intensely disliking playing in public and having strict rules about where he would perform. (“No chandeliers” was a requirement.) His Debussy series is something of a benchmark, and I had no idea that any excerpts of it were on YouTube, but they are, Blanche, they are, and you can listen to one of them by clicking above.
