Argerich a genuine living legend of the classical music world
THERE are a few things everyone in the music world knows, or thinks they know, about Martha Argerich, the Argentine-born pianist who is getting a Kennedy Centre Honour on Sunday.
She’s private, moody and unpredictable. She’s wildly beautiful, with a long, thick mass of hair - once dark, now grey - and a radiant, quick smile, and at 75, she still wears the peasant blouses and cotton pants of a teenager circa 1968. And she plays the piano brilliantly, ferociously and, perhaps, better than anyone else on Earth.
Trying to pin her down for an interview seems impossible. She is said to give interviews only rarely, with reluctance. To get her to talk in 2008, Gramophone magazine enlisted the help of the pianist Stephen Kovacevich, one of the three fathers of her three daughters, who has been called the great love of her life, although they broke up for the last time in the 1970s. Even with Kovacevich there, she became physically ill at ease when the tape recorder was switched on.
Yet when an interview time is eventually named, and a number dialed, there she is, on the phone from her oldest daughter’s house in Switzerland, speaking in a lilting, girlish voice, sounding warm and natural and utterly unlike a formidable reclusive genius.
But after all, travelling to the States to accept a Kennedy Centre Honour isn’t in keeping with her image as someone who has little use for awards, either.
“It was my daughter,” she says. “My daughter insisted very much. And then (the violinist) Itzhak Perlman phoned and told me, ‘You know, it’s a lot of fun.’ And then I looked at some people who had received that, and then, of course, I felt very honoured. ... But I don’t understand, because I think I haven’t done much in America.”
Not much, that is, apart from appearing with most of the country’s leading orchestras: the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. Other American orchestral appearances included a concerto recording with Mstislav Rostropovich and the National Symphony Orchestra.
Not much, apart from a string of concerts, one highlight the sold- out Carnegie Hall recital in 2000 that marked her first solo appearance in the States in nearly 20 years - after she decided, in the early 1980s, to stop performing alone and play only with orchestras and in chamber music. The performance was a benefit to raise money for the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, California, which she credits with saving her life when she was struck with a life-threatening recurrence of malignant melanoma in 1997.
“I was careful to do (the concert) two weeks before my checkup,” she remembers, “because I was afraid - if I do my checkup and it doesn’t go well, how will I play?” ( The checkup, happily, was clear.)
And now, the Kennedy Centre Honours are upon us, and the greatest pianist in the world, the artist whom other pianists almost universally venerate for her formidable technique and her instinctive musicianship, is “perplexed” about why she’s getting it and, worse yet, doesn’t know what to wear.
“I am a mess, really,” she says. “I have my concert outfits, and then otherwise - I have no idea.” There is a conspiratorial hint of a laugh in her voice, as if she recognises the humour in the situation, but she is certainly not joking.
“I am very worried about the whole thing.”
Argerich is a genuine living legend of the classical music world. But she has never particularly tried to cultivate an image as one. Or at least, not in conventional terms.
The story of Martha Argerich is a story about ferocious natural genius. Argerich cannot help speaking music - internalising a score and performing it with such depth and range and emotion and risk-taking that even nonaficionados are left agog. She has a photographic memory, able to reproduce music perfectly after a single hearing. Technical challenges pose no problems; “I have a thing for octaves,” she said, laughing, in a 1972 TV interview, of passages like the thunderous close of Tchaikovsky’s fi rst piano concerto, which most pianists find the stuff of anxiety dreams.
Schumann’s Toccata is supposed to be among the hardest pieces in the repertory; Argerich, who particularly adores Schumann, used it for years as a warm-up. (“Not anymore,” she says and laughs. “Now, I just start. I don’t warm up.”) Reaching far beyond mere technique is the artistry that underlies each performance, making you feel you are hearing her largely familiar and selective repertory - Bach and Chopin, Prokofiev and Ravel - for the first time.
“Only the greatest artists are able to maintain the freshness of discovery with the depth of thoughtfulness,” said Daniel Barenboim, the conductor and pianist, in a recent email from Europe. “Martha Argerich is one of them. From the beginning, she wasn’t a mechanic(al) virtuoso, only concerned with dexterity and speed.
“She mastered those as well, of course, but her fantasy enabled her to create a very unique quantity and quality of sounds on the piano.”
But Argerich’s is also a story about someone with superhuman gifts trying to fi nd a way to live a normal life. Many musicians live a life of monkish order, focusing on the discipline of music. Argerich, by contrast, has seemed to go out of her way to be disorganised.
She’s so given to canceling performances, sometimes at the last minute, that she long ago stopped signing contracts: Presenters who want her have to take the risk. And her personal life has been turbulent. The three daughters by three men are one illustration of a life filled with relationships; over and over, she has established veritable communes of young musicians and non-musicians who have wandered into her large, chaotic houses.
At the same time, she is fiercely loyal: Two of those three fathers, Kovacevich and the conductor Charles Dutoit, remain close friends. As do the pianist Nelson Freire, the cellist Mischa Maisky and the violinist Gidon Kremer - her two steadiest chamber music partners, with whom she has toured and recorded for decades - and Barenboim, who has known her since they were both child prodigies in Argentina, seven decades ago.
“There is nobody today that I have known as long as Martha,” Barenboim said. “Our relationship is based on music, of course, but there is also a very human love that connects us.”
Argerich’s lifestyle choices stem partly from temperament. She seems to naturally like sleeping until 2 in the afternoon, spending hours talking on the phone or watching TV or surrounded by friends, and practicing the piano, if at all, in the wee hours of the morning. In a startlingly revealing film documentary, “Bloody Daughter” (2012), her youngest daughter, Stephanie Argerich (Kovacevich’s daughter), unsparingly and affectionately displays the ups and downs of living with a legend: the children falling asleep under the piano; dance parties in front of the television; the mother’s attitude sometimes childlike, sometimes cavalier, especially when it came to things like getting the children to school. ( Her middle daughter, Annie Dutoit, says on camera that attending school was, in their household, something of a rebellion - and their only exposure to rules and order.)
Argerich’s life choices have come under fire from many-her domineering late mother, Juanita, very much included. But those choices are also partly about selfpreservation: concrete evidence of a lifelong rebellion against the increasing regimentation and restriction of a life in music.
“I don’t know why (orchestras) need to be so sure what is going to happen in two, three years,” she says. “Sometimes people are asking about what you are doing in 2019. Jacques ( Thelen, Argerich’s manager) will say, ‘She doesn’t even know what she is going to do next month. ...’ It’s ridiculous, and not normal.”
Only the greatest artists are able to maintain the freshness of discovery with the depth of thoughtfulness. Martha Argerich is one of them. From the beginning, she wasn’t a mechanic(al) virtuoso, only concerned with dexterity and speed. She mastered those as well, of course, but her fantasy enabled her to create a very unique quantity and quality of sounds on the piano. Daniel Barenboim, conductor and pianist