This DVD of an Italian television recital opens with the camera panning across a packed audience awaiting the sight and sound of the legendary and mercurial Michelangeli. But if his Galuppi and Scarlatti have all of his uncanny and autocratic perfection, his Beethoven remains glacial and aloof, disdaining anything in the nature of warmth or commitment.

Of course it is fascinating to see how each note is weighed so exactly, how everything is achieved with the minimum of effort or movement. But Michelangeli’s curt and imperious alternative to nuance and inflection turns music of the richest human import into an icy abstraction. Any love for the minute repertoire he chose to perform in public seems erased by an obsessive and neurotic quest for perfection; Op 2 No 3, a joyous virtuoso sonata, can rarely have sounded so dour and unsmiling. The Scherzo, in particular, may have a shot-from-guns precision but it is entirely without wit or humour. Similarly, you may admire trills in the last sonata that glitter like arctic sunlight but you will hardly be taken on a journey which leads ‘to the shores of paradise’ (Edward Sackville-West).

Here, then, is playing recorded long after Cortot’s description of Michelangeli as ‘a reincarnation of Liszt’. In this instance Michelangeli hardly, in Liszt’s words, ‘conjures scent and blossom’ or ‘breathes the breath of life’ but keeps both composer and audience severely at arm’s length.