It was as much spectacle as concert. Martha Argerich had not given a recital in New York since 1981. She has suffered from a number of problems, physical and otherwise. She is one of the great cancelers in all of music; at one point, concert organizers pretty much gave up on booking her, knowing that they were likely to be disappointed. But the mercurial nature of Argerich’s career has merely added to her status. There is an excitement about her that has little to do with music. The infrequency of her appearances, coupled with her prodigious technique, has built a myth.
When she showed up at Carnegie Hall on March 25, the public went mad. The applause that greeted her was thunderous, frenzied, as at a rock concert, one imagines. This obviously annoyed Argerich, who was impatient to begin. All through the first half of her program, she played like a woman who was somewhat shocked to be there and who could not wait to get off the stage. She opened with the Partita No. 2 of Bach, in C minor. This was cold, harsh, aggressive Bach, with little lyricism to it. It was also grossly overpedaled, sometimes turning to mush. Argerich jabbed and poked and banged at the keyboard. Nothing was melting or affecting; everything was bulled through, with scant beauty. Seldom do you get both overpedaled and harsh—usually it is one or the other. The Courante was especially vulgar, hardly Bach at all. The closing Capriccio was an ordeal to sit through. Not only was it rushed and indistinct, it was pelted with bizarre sforzandos. Argerich is known—justly—as a Prokofiev pianist, but when she brings the qualities of Prokofiev to Bach, she wreaks disaster. In this performance, Bach was the odd man out.
Argerich then assayed a couple of Chopin pieces, the beloved Barcarolle and the Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor. The Barcarolle, like the Bach, was rushed and impatient, but at least it showed some lyricism and sweep. Argerich, for all her technical skill, is not an interesting pianist coloristically; her palette is rather limited. She did, however, give the Barcarolle a stylish ending: calm, limpid, and lovely. Her playing of the Scherzo, as could have been expected, was muscular and thrilling. Even here, though, there was bravura for its own sake, without musical purpose. And as before, there was something cold and heartless about her performance. Argerich did not really finish her phrases; everything was bluntly dispatched. Strange as it may be to say about a lionized pianist, if a student in a conservatory banged away like this– unmusically and heedlessly—he would be kicked out of his teacher’s studio.
Argerich concluded the first half of her program with one of her specialties, the Prokofiev Sonata No. 7 in B-flat. This piece, clearly, was meant for Argerich, or she for it. Here at last she got to the guts of the music; it was not merely thrown off. Her percussiveness, her tenseness, her relentlessness—all are welcome in Prokofiev, or at least not harmful. Still, she did not seem completely settled. She allowed far too little space between movements. The final section, Precipitato, had the necessary propulsion, but it was carelessly fast and could have been jauntier, jazzier. Impressive though it was, there was a machine-like quality to it. Here is an important difference between Argerich and one of her teachers, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who was usually a musician first and a pianist, or technician, second.
The second half of the program, Argerich did in collaboration. The major piece was Schumann’s piano quintet, performed with the Juilliard String Quartet. This should be an excellent vehicle for Argerich—it is big, bold, and glorious, a sort of piano concerto with string quartet. But Argerich could not help being Argerich. Her playing was cold and severe, with those jolting and unwanted outbursts of sound. There was no musical thread running through this account; it was skittish, episodic. The second movement, oddly, was too restrained, with the pianist failing to speak up melodically. And the Scherzo was taken at an absurdly fast pace —an unsustainable, indefensible pace. One simply could not hear the music, its character being lost. The final Allegro, too, was fast and loud, but without musical intensity or satisfaction. In all, this performance was a reminder of the importance of basic musical values.
Argerich is a maddening, confusing pianist. Loaded with talent, she repeatedly squanders it. At her best, she is electric, provoking in the listener an almost physical response. At her worst, she is a barbarian, pulverizing the keyboard and killing off music as a result. But she is well worth catching when you can—a phenomenon, for good or ill.