There is something
utterly timeless about this. The setting itself, presumably
one of RAI’s Turin studios, is so simple (at Michelangeli’s
own request) that its bare white walls could as easily be the
inside of a space capsule. Long shots are out so we never get
to see if there is an auditorium behind the camera – the mind
supposes just another white wall. If there is an auditorium
there is certainly no public in it. So just a confined, ascetic
space with a piano – also timeless for no maker’s name appears
on it, only a mysterious emblem – a sturdy old-fashioned microphone
and our pianist. Here again our sense of reality is challenged
for he is playing in full evening dress though no one is there
to see him.
Even the occasional
wonkiness of the forty-year-old picture contributes to the suggestion
that we may as well be receiving our images from the confines
of the universe as from a familiar European city. This in its
turn gives Michelangeli himself a timeless appearance; he was
by then 42 and presumably in real life his face was beginning
to bear the odd wrinkle attendant upon early middle age. Filtered
through technology unable to register the finer details, he
could possibly be much older than his years, but he could equally
have found the elixir of youth, for there is something of the
callow young student, Goethe’s Werther maybe, to his body frame.
His actual control
over the instrument is so superhuman as to suggest extra-terrestrial
intervention. He himself seems incredibly remote, his face expressionless
except for a very occasional chewing of his moustache, suggesting
(I suppose) some slight reservation over what he has just done
– not a reservation the rest of us are likely to share. Of all
the pianists I have seen live or on video, only Rubinstein and
Horowitz have provided equally total demonstration of the fact
that the fingers are the ONLY contact with the instrument and
that ONLY this contact creates the sound and the performance.
No other body movement is allowed which does not directly assist
the fingers. Of course his arms move when despatching chains
of octaves or when leaping up and down the keyboard at the climax
of the second Scherzo – but the fingers always lead the way.
Michelangeli also
challenges our sense of reality by virtually playing the almost
two-hour programme at one stretch. There are, it is true, a
few breaks in the picture between items (without counting them,
I’d say not more than about four), but more often the cameras
remain trained on him as he finishes a piece, slowly withdraws
his hands, collects his thoughts, occasionally reaches for a
handkerchief hidden inside the piano, wipes his brow or (more
often) the keyboard, and then gets on with the next piece.
And what playing!
Earlier on, in the Sonata mainly, I felt that his insistence
on a finely sculpted line, on playing even pianissimos through
the public address system as it were, could have its downside
(as it also could with Richter), but as the programme proceeds
he seems increasingly to be communing only with himself. Some
of his rubato is extreme yet it is wedded to such a perfect
sense of rhythmic continuity that it always works. How typical
of this enigmatic artist that his slender repertoire (virtually
all the Chopin he ever played is here) should contain one of
the posthumous Waltzes that normally only gets played by pianists
booked to record the lot, and that he should make it sound an
absolute masterpiece. From the Waltzes onwards – but above all
in the Mazurkas and the Berceuse – we have some of the supreme
performances of these particular works ever recorded. This film
may not really be reaching us from the outer reaches of the
universe, but it deserves to be heard and seen out there.
A curious testimony
to human fallibility has seeped its way into the heart of the
enterprise. I am not referring to the clanginess of the fortes,
which could have been toned down a bit (as RAI themselves seem
to have done for radio broadcasts of this material), or to the
odd slip in Misha Donat’s basically fine essay – he states that
Michelangeli’s recorded repertoire included the Liszt Second
Concerto, but it was actually the First (at least four versions
exist). These are ephemeral matters that can be corrected in
later reissues. No, the very fabric of the recording is flawed
for, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes irritatingly obtrusive,
interference from a nearby radio station can be heard practically
throughout. At first I supposed this DVD derived from somebody’s
home-taping on a bad day for reception, but no, there is the
RAI-TRADE emblem to prove that this is an “official” release
mastered from the original tapes. The second possibility is
that the studio and/or the microphone were inadequately screened
against such interference. It seems barely credible that such
a thing could happen with a major European broadcasting company,
but as the Italians will tell you, with “Mamma RAI” anything
is possible. At this point I recalled that I had an off-the-air
tape of a radio broadcast of what must be the same performance
of the Sonata, and it is in fact bedevilled by disturbance which
I had always supposed to be a factor of reception on the day
I recorded it. A little investigation proved that the disturbance
is in fact the SAME as on the DVD so, alas, it is there on the
master tape and nothing can be done about it without wiping
half the piano sound off in the process. I’m glad Opus Arte
didn’t try to do that, but I think they might have added a technical
warning.
All the same, this
DVD offers a quite extraordinary experience, something timeless
that goes beyond the confines of Chopin and Michelangeli themselves
to touch the universal. A musical DVD collection that misses
out on it will be incomplete. Also in 1962, Michelangeli recorded
programmes of Beethoven/Scarlatti/Galuppi and Debussy for RAI
television – Opus Arte are issuing these too.
Christopher
Howell
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Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
(piano)
[106:00]
