Prospero | Classical music

The wondrous power of Martha Argerich

Her performances are at once thunderous and skilful, transcendent and human

By E.H.

WHEN MY father died, suddenly and unexpectedly, I found there were several things I could no longer do. To all outward appearances, I could still function perfectly normally. But I could no longer concentrate for long periods of time; novels, once my main source of comfort and pleasure, were discarded after a few pages. Even the news became a blur. Channels were hopped, Twitter was scrolled, pages were turned automatically: nothing seemed to make a mark. But as the weeks went on, I realised that one of the few things I could do to distract myself was to listen to music—specifically, music played by Martha Argerich.

Ms Argerich, now 78 years old, is considered by many critics and classical-music fans to be the world’s greatest living pianist. On August 17th at the BBC Proms, I was reminded of why her performances cut through my grief. Even in the Royal Albert Hall in London—where the acoustics can dim and blunt the music, giving the occasional impression that you are listening to something at the end of a long tunnel—her performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1”, accompanied by Daniel Barenboim and the West Divan Orchestra, was transfixing.

Ms Argerich plays with incredible force and speed. Critics have long felt the need to compare her performances to a man’s, seemingly unable to countenance the fact that such ferocious, almost demonic, power and nimbleness could come from a woman. Khatia Buniatishvili, a French-Georgian pianist, recalled hearing Ms Argerich’s performance of a Brahms rhapsody in a piece for the New York Times in 2017. Ms Buniatishvili had been told the piece of music was “for men, not for women”; she remembered being “shocked and fascinated by the fact that [Ms Argerich] was a woman and it was a very strong performance and interpretation”.

Ms Argerich often tackles works that make other pianists wilt. In an interview in 1972 she said she had “a thing for octaves”. That could be seen at the Proms: the double octaves were executed with agility, her fingers appearing fleetingly on the keys yet leaving a lasting impression. The one, brilliant, documentary about her life from 2014, entitled “Bloody Daughter” (it was filmed by one of her three daughters), shows a rehearsal scene in which she is asked to slow down, momentarily, so that the orchestra can catch up with her.

This intensity can be seen in her early recordings, whether it is Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” and Chopin’s “Scherzos: No. 2” in 1966, or Bach’s “English Suite” in 1969. But it has not lessened with age. In one of the main concerts featured in “Bloody Daughter”, a performance of Chopin’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” in Warsaw, Ms Argerich’s hands are almost a blur, they move at such speed. So too at the Proms: after her performance, it seemed as if the audience let out a collective sigh of astonishment at what they had seen.

At these moments Ms Argerich, with her energy and effervescence, makes listeners feel very much alive; her performances are feats of endurance, as well as examples of superb skill. As Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s classical-music critic, put it in a profile in 2001: “The way the piano suddenly thunders under the pressure of Argerich’s small frame is a physical fact that resists explanation. It can only be described as a possession, a visitation, such as seems to happen when great singers take the stage.”

But within that passionate, thunderous visitation is a sense of uncertainty, of fragility. Ms Argerich often cancels concerts: mostly because of illnesses, but sometimes seemingly because of nerves. After she became renowned in her native Argentina as a child prodigy, performing from the age of eight, she moved to New York and stopped playing altogether for several years, spending her time mooching about and watching late-night television. Once she started playing again, she no longer wanted to be alone. She stopped giving solo recitals in the 1980s, preferring the company of an orchestra.

Her nerves remain: in another scene in “Bloody Daughter” she is seen backstage, protesting that she doesn’t want to go out, that it is “not right”, before being gently coaxed into performing. Although she has the ability to sight-read the trickiest of music instantly, and once picked up a piece of music in her sleep (her partner was obsessively practising a score in another room), her effortlessness is inflected with moments of self-doubt.

This combination—of the bold and the uncertain, the confident and the unsure—made her music such a comfort to me. Listening to her play, or watching her perform, feels close to something miraculous. It is not just the rarity of it, but the alchemy of hearing and of witnessing a great performer transcend her anxieties, in what can only be described as a moment of grace.

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