Gabriela Montero
I didn’t think that anyone would care about my improvisation, but it is part of me THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
‘It just happens. It’s immediate access, always. It never, never fails and I always explain it as a domino effect, once the first note falls. Everything else follows. And that’s it.’
Gabriela Montero is telling me about her gift for improvisation, which produces astonishing inventions that are never repeated in the same way. They apparently come to her in a natural flow as if they are operations of an unconscious spirit that bypasses all the usual processes of thought and composition.
We are in the pianist’s home in Barcelona, looking across the city, and she is talking about two passions – the music that she says envelops every aspect of her life, and her despair about the condition of her homeland, Venezuela, where she says that corruption, violence and economic collapse have produced ‘a mafia state’.
And since she accuses president Nicolas Maduro’s regime of using the worldwide success of the country’s famous El
Sistema music education programme as a propaganda tool – the appointment of his former propaganda minister as its head and his son as another director would certainly seem to be something of a giveaway – she pledges to fight Maduro on the cultural battleground. ‘He uses music to whitewash repression. I use it to argue for freedom.’
Montero and her husband, the Irishborn baritone Sam Mcelroy, work to help young musicians who have left Venezuela – not wanting them to share the fate of a young clarinettist who was abducted and locked away for six weeks in a fearsome military jail earlier this year for the crime of mildly criticising Maduro online. For Montero, her political activism and her musical life are firmly entwined.
Her musicianship is remarkable, and all the more so for being instinctive. As a young prodigy she played entirely from memory, and because she was born with perfect pitch and a natural ability to
absorb complex compositions without having any of the usual equipment – a knowledge of harmonic structure, or the building blocks of a sonata, for example – she never considered herself to be ‘different’. But she was. ‘It was not until I was in my twenties that I realised. I thought everyone had perfect pitch and was the same as me. I had thought nothing of it. And, you know, I thought everybody improvised.’
When she won bronze at the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1995, she bamboozled everyone when, like all the medallists, she was asked to perform one piece in a concert finale. The others chose a favourite Chopin waltz or etude. She made one up. ‘I improvised a mazurka that was completely my own, with no connection to anything,’ she recalls. ‘No one knew I was going to do that – I didn’t even know myself. There was a commotion and my friend told me afterwards that the radio broadcasters didn’t know what to do. What was it? A posthumous composition that no one had known? Later, they thought it was so shocking.’
Until she was 16, Montero was taught in the US by a teacher in Miami who, she says, wasn’t interested in improvisation. ‘She told me it was garbage and not to do it. I was encouraged to play what was written on the page.’ They were, she thinks, wasted years. ‘I had a very peculiar and very absent musical education.’ It was only in her late teens, away from Miami that her studies took the necessary leap forward. She had left Venezuela because her talent demanded high-octane training, but she wasn’t getting it. Only when she got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London (where she studied under Hamish Milne) did she begin to develop as a rounded artist with a grasp of a wide repertoire.
However, the urge to improvise didn’t slacken. The child who had shown a brilliant talent wasn’t interested in limiting herself to music without the addition of her own thoughts. ‘I had done it as a child. If you watch [my performance of] the Haydn D minor Concerto online – I think I was eight – you’ll see that I do an encore, and it’s an improvisation that’s almost as long as the concerto. It was just an inevitable gravitational pull to the piano through improvisation. When I played the Haydn I couldn’t really read music. I always learned to play by ear.’
The turning point came about 20 years ago when she met the legendary Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich in Montreal. ‘I improvised for her and I played some Schumann and Beethoven, and basically she gave me motivation. She said: “Gabriela you have to share this with the world. Why are you not improvising in public?” I didn’t think the world would understand it. I didn’t think anyone would care, but it was me. I had to come full circle and become me on stage.’
In recent times, she and Mcelroy have been on a journey of discovery. A neuro-scientist in Baltimore, Dr Charles Limb, has been exploring the changes in Montero’s brain during improvisation. Mcelroy describes the challenge: ‘What we’re trying to find out is whether or not in Gaby’s particular case her brain functions differently when she plays memorised music as opposed to improvised music. For the experiment, she was given instructions in 30-second random bursts to play a pre-designated memorised piece of music – and then to switch as soon as she was asked to do so by the computer to the improvised state. So, in other words, her environment didn’t change.
‘What Limb actually saw was that
Gaby’s auditory cortex, which processes sound – and which you’d expect to be on fire if you’re creating in the moment –
was closing down or switching off. It was sort of getting out of the way. So Dr Limb then had to ask the question, “Well, if the normal systems are not being used then what is being used?’ And so they created a 3D model of Gaby’s brain through the computer and sliced through it until they found some sort of activity.
‘In fact, they found a huge amount of activity in her visual cortex – a firework display of activity during the improvised process. She was looking at music and seeing it as a landscape in a way that some mathematicians view numbers.’
But Montero says that this does not reflect her own thinking, so Limb has concluded that the pianist’s visual cortex is co-opted to help with the complicated business of improvising, in the way that a laptop can be made more powerful by using an extra graphics card, for example.
This, of course, is an intensely personal journey. Mcelroy is currently making a film of Limb’s work, hoping that it may help to explain a unique talent. It’s easy to observe the outcome – online you can hear and watch Montero play an astonishing piece of improvisation lasting 62 minutes, without a pause, in a recording appropriately entitled Take One. Limb continues to fine-tune the scientific explanation of what Montero’s brain is doing to create this intriguing and instinctive music.
Alongside this voyage, Montero is preparing to launch a recording of her own First Piano Concerto, the ‘Latin Concerto’ (see ‘From piano to page’, p42), which she’ll perform in two concerts with the Bournemouth Symphony, the ensemble with whom she is artist-in-residence for the 2019-20 season. She also has recitals across Europe, plus engagements with the recently formed The Gabriela Montero Ensemble, but, at home, a great part of her life is bound up with the Venezuelan crisis.
We talk about the dramatic success of the country’s flagship Simón Bolivar Orchestra, particularly when Gustavo Dudamel was conductor, and the El Sistema programme that lies behind it.
For Montero, the project has become a smokescreen for a government that she sees as repressive and corrupt. She and Mcelroy spend a good deal of time trying to help those who are committed to reform, and are keen to provide assistance to players and singers who can tell a different story about culture in Venezuela, one that is much darker than the glamour associated with the youth orchestra.
In her home, I meet a Venezuelan human rights lawyer who is planning to take President Maduro to the International Criminal Court on torture charges. There’s also a young singer there whom Montero and Mcelroy are helping to put through the Dublin Conservatoire. For them, a commitment to music also means a commitment to freedom.
And running through it all is that remarkable talent to improvise, in a state of mind that seems to operate in a way that bypasses the usual mechanisms of musicianship. I wonder if we might live to see a machine that would be able to read her brain, and turn her thoughts directly into a musical score.
‘I am waiting for someone to invent the technology, so I can be hooked up directly to something that will print out what happens in my head,’ she replies. ‘I would compose sonatas and string quartets and it would be a nice way to keep them because it all happens in my mind. There’s no time to think. It’s just a direct download, which I myself witness for the first time when my fingers touch the keys.’
Montero’s recording of her Latin Concerto plus Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, with the Orchestra of the Americas under Carlos Miguel Prieto, is out on Orchid Classics
‘I am waiting for technology that will print out what happens in my head’