Dport 15

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920-1995) mastered the art of being elusive. During his long career the legendary Italian pianist’s forays into the recording studio were few and far between. The concerts and broadcast performances he didn’t cancel, though, sometimes found their way onto pirated discs. This allowed pianophiles to gain a fuller dimension of their puzzling, ultra-perfectionist hero.

Marie-Martin Marcel de Marin (1796–1850) was a French composer who led both personal and professional lives that are worth reviewing today. He was a mathematician, an expat, the Captain of Versailles' Dragoons, a violinist and above all a composer. His harp compositions are very different from the repertoire of his contemporaries. His music features quite a peculiar mix of stylistic elements of various origins, including the heritage of the great Baroque composers and the early 18th-century style of French keyboard music. He succeeded in creating a language for the harp that was acclaimed as revolutionary during his lifetime and is still today worth rediscovering, revealing Marin to be a forerunner of a style that was found in harp music only at the beginning of the 20th century.