Ravenna Festival: Il demone della perfezione – The genius of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
Free
Domenico Bevilacqua, piano
Roberto Cotroneo in conversation with Matteo Cavezzali.
A matchless genius of the piano, algid and detached, crystal-clear and passionate, endowed with an unrivalled musical character, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, aka ABM, started to radically change the spirit and technique of piano performance from the moment of his début. Before him, such great talents as Paderewski, Cortot, Rubinstein, Rachmaninov, Horowitz, and Gilels had astonished the world with their powerful performances, claiming interpretive freedom and sometimes indulging in temperamental mistakes. Yet, with ABM, everything changed. Impressed by his greatness at a concert in Geneva, Cortot exclaimed “A new Liszt is born!” But there was more to it: the genius of ABM was after absolute clarity of sound, and would not settle for anything less than perfection.
Roberto Cotroneo, an eclectic intellectual and one of the protagonists of Italian cultural life in recent decades, pays homage to a genius that often transcended the narrow field of classical music. In Cotroneo’s essay, ABM emerges as the gateway to an apparently lost world—the world of talent, perfection, discipline and severity—virtues that seem distant and hopelessly irretrievable today. This is why Cotroneo’s essay, Il demone della perfezione, is “a book about genius as well as an origami, a meditation exercise, a study of transcendental performance, which plunges us into music to open our eyes.” On stage, at the piano, a teenager student, 17-year-old pianist Domenico Bevilacqua, who will approach the genius of ABM with due awe, but also with the innocent heart of youth.
The livestream will take place at 9:30pm Central European Summer Time / 12:30pm Pacific.
Watch the livestream here: https://www.ravennafestival.live/en/events/il-demone-della-perfezione/