A thing for octaves’

‘A thing for octaves’ Martha Argerich

The story of Martha Argerich is a narrative about ferocious all-natural genius. Argerich can't help talking music -- internalizing a dent and doing it with such depth and emotion and range and risk-taking that non-aficionados are abandoned agog. She's got a photographic memory, able to replicate music flawlessly after just one hearing. Technical challenges pose no issues;"I've a thing for octaves," she explained, laughing, at a 1972 TV meeting, of passages such as the thunderous near Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, which many pianists find the substance of pressure fantasies. Schumann's Toccata is presumed to be one of the toughest bits in the repertory; Argerich, that especially loves Schumann, used it for decades since a warm-up. "I simply begin. I really don't warm up.") Reaching far beyond simple procedure is that the artistry that amuses each operation, which makes you feel you're hearing her mainly recognizable and discerning repertory -- both Bach and Chopin, Prokofiev and Ravel -- for the very first time. "Just the best artists can keep the freshness of discovery together with the thickness of thoughtfulness," explained Daniel Barenboim, the conductor and pianist, at a recent email by Europe. "Martha Argerich is just one of these. From the start, she was not a mechanic [al] virtuoso, just worried about dexterity and speed. She mastered these too, clearly, but her dream enabled her to make an extremely distinctive amount and quality of sounds on the piano" But she does not behave like one.

There are a couple of things everybody in the audio world knows, or thinks they understand, roughly Martha Argerich, the Argentine-born pianist who's becoming a Kennedy Center Honor on Sunday. She is personal, moody and unpredictable. She is wildly beautiful, using a long, thick mass of hair once dark, today grey -- along with a glowing, fast grin, and in 75, she wears the peasant blouses and silk trousers of a teenager circa 1968. And she plays the piano ferociously and, possibly, better than anybody else on Earth.

Attempting to pin down for a meeting looks hopeless. She's thought to offer interviews only infrequently, with hesitation. For her to speak in 2008, Gramophone magazine commissioned the support of the pianist Stephen Kovacevich, among the three fathers of her daughters, that has been known as the fantastic love of her life, even though they awoke for the last time from the 1970s. Despite Kovacevich there, she became physically ill at ease once the cassette recorder was switched . However as soon as an interview period is finally called, and also a number dialed, there she is, on the telephone away from her oldest daughter's home in Switzerland, talking in a lilting, girlish voice, sounding natural and warm and completely unlike a strong reclusive genius.

But after all, traveling into the States to take a Kennedy Center Honor is not in keeping her picture as someone with little use for awards.

"It had been my daughter," she states. And [the violinist] Itzhak Perlman telephoned and informed me,'You know, it is a good deal of fun.' And I looked at some individuals who'd obtained this, then, clearly, I felt quite honored. . . . However, I really don't know, since I believe I have not done much in the usa."

Not much, aside from a series of concerts, 1 highlight the sold-out Carnegie Hall recital in 2000 that indicated her first solo appearance in the States in almost 20 years after she chose, in the early 1980s, to quit performing independently and play just with orchestras and in chamber music. "I was cautious to perform [the concert] fourteen days ahead of my checkup," she recalls,"because I had been afraid -- should I do my own checkup and it does not go well, how can I perform?" (The checkup, thankfully, was apparent.)

And today, the Kennedy Center Honors is upon usand the best pianist in the world, the artist that other pianists virtually universally venerate because of her powerful technique and her instinctive musicianship, is"perplexed" about why she is getting it and, worse yet, does not know exactly what to wear.

"I'm a wreck, actually," she states. "I've my concert decals, then differently -- I don't have any idea." There's a conspiratorial sign of a laugh in her voice, as though she admits that the comedy in the circumstance, but she's definitely not joking. "I'm rather concerned about the entire thing."

But she's never especially tried to cultivate an image as you can.

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