[Posted on the 5 January, the offical date of ABM's birth, though he once claimed it was in the first hour of the 6th!] I've recently seen that a new book on the pianist, I concerti di Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli by Antonio Armella was published in December 2025. It retails at around 33 Euros/ £28 on Amazon, where the blurb is: "This unique book reconstructs the concert life of one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, the great Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, thro

Francesco Ermini Polacci wrote in December 2025: Contrary to what has always been repeated, for example, Benedetti Michelangeli had a wide range of musical knowledge, and such as to belie his supposed unavailability for 20th-century music: few know of his studies of Bartok's Sonata for two pianos and percussion, tackled with Dinu Lipatti, his favourite pianist; and few know of his planned performance of Schönberg's Piano Concerto with Bruno Maderna on the podium. Anyone have

Two snippets from an interview with Howard Klein for The New York Times, 16 January 1966 Contempt Michelangeli's repertory is basically romantic, but he has played all the piano music of Schoenberg and Webern's Variations. But for music after the 1950s he has contempt. He suavely mimed an avant-garde pianist at work: the left elbow gracefully smashed into the bass of an imaginary keyboard, followed by the right, then the right index finger twanged a string. This was amplifie

A letter (dated 22 June 1942) from Ildebrando Pizzetti [1880-1968] to the publisher Ricordi:  Vi interesserà sapere, credo, che anche il pianista Benedetti Michelangeli intende studiare ed eseguire i Canti della Stagione Alta. Per lui scriverò due nuove «cadenze». 'You will be interested to know, I believe, that pianist Benedetti Michelangeli also intends to study and perform the Canti della Stagione Alta  (1930). I will write two new "cadenzas" for him.' ​ The concerto was d