Every appearance by Martha Argerich is inescapably an event. She is such an exceptional pianist by any standard, and her visits anywhere were for many years such rarities that she long ago acquired a legendary status. But there is a problem.
The problem with Argerich’s appearances is not, as it once was, whether she would actually turn up. These days, she plays in the UK a lot – steely Liszt at this summer’s Proms, the Schumann concerto a few weeks later, and this Wigmore Hall concert, only her third appearance at the venue in 40 years. Argerich is back in January too, playing Prokofiev. It’s a bumper period for her legions of admirers.
The problem is that for many years now Argerich has been uncomfortable playing on her own in public. It’s certainly not that, at 75, she can’t any longer play the solo repertoire; her technique remains utterly formidable. It’s just that she nowadays seems to depend on the presence of other musicians to coax her out on to a public platform. Even then, she is visibly uneasy in the spotlight.
This can bring amazing musical rewards in concertos and chamber music. But it means that an Argerich appearance is now also dependent on the players with whom she shares the platform. That’s especially true in the tricky four-handed and two-piano repertoire that she has favoured recently with partners including Daniel Barenboim. And the truth about this joint 75th birthday concert with her fellow Argentinian veteran Alberto Portugheis is that the pairing proved too unequal.
They began with the Mozart sonata in D for two pianos, side by side, Portugheis at the front of the stage, Argerich behind him, practically invisible from my seat. The allegro was dispatched with terrific energy, but Argerich’s surer touch and richer tone was easy to discern in the andante, as were some characteristically dramatic runs in the finale. Rachmaninov’s Six Pieces for duet Opus 11, written in 1894 and played in four hands on one instrument, fared less well. This music is top-drawer Rachmaninov, but the coordination and balance was often uncertain, and it felt too often as if one was trying to listen to Argerich through the confused texture of Portugheis’s playing.
Things improved greatly after the interval, principally because Argerich and Portugheis changed places, so that now she took the primo part in Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye pieces. Argerich’s weighting of Ravel’s delicate and supple upper lines was ideal, and at the end of the second piece she achieved more expression from a single chord than might seem rationally possible. Her perfectly judged glissando sweeps at the end of the sequence will stay in the memory.
Brahms is not a composer much associated with Argerich, but the way she took charge in the two-piano version of the composer’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn made one wish she played him more. Once again, it was Argerich to whom one instinctively listened rather than Portugheis. Two encores followed, by Piazzolla and Milhaud, each rather haphazardly executed.
