The Besancon International Music festival paid a moving tribute to the great pianist Dinu Lipatti for the 60^th anniversary of the pianist’s last public performance. On September 16^th 1950 Dinu Lipatti gave what would be his last recital at the Salle du Parlement in Besancon. Sixty years later, French writer Andre Tubeuf was in the same hall, giving a moving tribute to the pianist and his art. Tubeuf had heard the news of Lipatti’s death on December 3, 1950, which was immediately followed by a broadcast of this Besancon recital – he spoke of how unusual it was to hear the pianist as if he was alive immediately after his death was announced. Shortly after Tubeuf’s lecture, Paul Badura-Skoda gave a memorial recital at the Kursaal in Besancon. The first half of the program was the same as the one Lipatti had played 60 years earlier, and the pressure may have been too much for the 83-year-old Badura-Skoda. He was not technically at ease and a bit rigid. The second half was devoted to Chopin – not the fourteen Waltzes as Lipatti’s had been, but a selection of Waltzes, Mazurkas, and Nocturnes – and here he was much more free and his playing was more nuanced.
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