DG’s “Martha Argerich Collection” consolidates and confirms (if confirmation were necessary) our sense of a unique vision and virtuosity. Here, simply and assuredly, is one of the most magisterial talents in the entire history of piano playing, so that this 11-disc box and tribute (its contents forever journeying from shelf to CD player) proudly stands next to parallel recorded celebrations of Rachmaninov, Cortot and Horowitz – immortal examples of re-creative genius.
Even the greatest pianists can be disarmed at the mention of Argerich’s name, stunned into unaccustomed silence by her witchery of gifts. Yet reacquaintance with so many legendary performances also reminds us of how lazy assumptions are a poor alternative to revitalized opinion, for the keenest critical appraisal. Returning to Argerich is like confronting a magical crystal that obligingly shatters into glittering fragments so that it can be lovingly rebuilt and restored to an ever more pristine state. Such a process is both exhilarating and exhausting, for Argerich is hardly a comfortable companion, confirming your preconceptions. Indeed, she sets your heart and mind reeling so that you positively cry out for respite from her dazzling and super-sensitive enquiry. But again, in the final resort, she is surely (unlike Horowitz, for example) a great musician first and a great pianist second. The division may be artificial but it is difficult to resist saying that whether her transcendental pianism creates rivers of fire or a timeless sense of Elysium, her musical priorities are always clear.
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In Schumann and Liszt (to complete the triumvirate of great romantics) Argerich is no less quixotic, turbulent, serene or what you will. Hear her releasing the mystery at the heart of the Second “Intermezzo” from Kreisleriana (the one that left poor Clara begging, like Lady Macbeth, for more lucidity and less “admired disorder”) and note how her Eusebius is so painfully lost in multicoloured dreams, how her Florestan hints at something frighteningly beyond boisterous high-jinks. And such things are achieved without a trace of self-consciousness or artifice. Again her fire-and-ice Liszt (her B minor Sonata is as rhetorically savage as any on record) is contrasted with Bach that shows a peerless balance of sense and sensibility, by a discreet but unmistakable humanity and warming of all possible austerity.
Then, I am reminded of how Argerich’s favoured partners (here, Freire and Economou as well as her conductors) are propelled into a commitment that must surely astonish them in retrospect. No performance of Beethoven’s First and Second Concertos offers greater charm and brio, are more conciliatory or confrontational. Impossible, too, to imagine Ma mere l’oye or the Rapsodie espagnole (Ravel’s relative innocence and exoticism memorably underlined by Peter Sadlo’s and Edgar Guggeis’s percussion) more touchingly or potently realized.
Finally, a suggestion concerning Argerich’s enigmatic silence (her last solo recording was made in 1984). Her protest that she suffers from loneliness when isolated on the concert platform is a teasing half-truth. What she surely and, no doubt self-consciously, senses is the fragility of her Olympian gifts, their curse and blessing – of how, abused or overexposed, such an elixir can vanish as mysteriously as it came (a dilemma memorably evoked in Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode). Frustratingly, but in the long term necessarily, Argerich has guarded the right to make her own choices. And if her free spirit leaves us tantalized, thirsting for the continuation of her Beethoven concerto cycle, for Chopin’s First and Fourth as well as his Second and Third Scherzos, for example, she has also left us overwhelmingly enriched, for ever in her debt. DG’s compensation is beyond price. Lavishly refurbished it is a presentation for initiates and uninitiated, for all musicians (not just pianists) alike.
NB: This review refers to an earlier release of Bartok and Ravel performances included in the box set pictured above
Having experienced great difficulty in keeping away from this CD long enough to actually write about it, I can happily confirm that its greatest virtues outweigh its few shortcomings many times over. To get the latter over with first, I have to admit that the Bartok is an extremely impetuous affair, with excitable tempos, alarmingly wide dynamics and the odd smudged detail. However, it is also one of the most compelling performances ever recorded, with the emphasis placed firmly on continuous argument and a level of intensity that extends as much to the quieter moments as, for example, to the fraught climax of the first movement's fugue. What is particularly wonderful here is the degree of subtle rubato that Argerich and Freire allow themselves, treating the music as music, and not as some modernist manifesto. The pace is fast, the textures bright, and when the excitement mounts (as it often does, especially in the outer movements), the tempo tends to increase further—although never to any damaging degree. The closing Allegro non troppo has a genuine sense of fun, leading to a climax of well-rehearsed confusion before scurrying away on dancing feet. It's a sketchy, brilliant, unpredictable, off-the-cuff account, the sort of playing that the work responds to but hardly ever receives (I recall that the Labeques' first recording—for Erato—had something of the same spontaneity).
As to the Ravel, well, any pre-audition misgivings were totally unjustified, and I certainly didn't anticipate such expressive playing on the part of percussionists Peter Sadlo and Edgar Guggeis. The arrangements are remarkably respectful of Ravel's originals, Ma Mere l'oye resembling Gaston Choisnel's two-piano version of 1911, the Rapsodie also reducing well to this particular instrumental formula (the ''Habanera'' was in any case originally composed for the two-piano medium). Sadlo's pitched-percussion garnishings are based largely on those that Ravel himself concocted for his orchestrations, but even those that aren't work wonderfully well. Aside from the expected tam-tam and xylophone in ''Empress of the pagodas'', there is the most exquisite high percussion in ''The fairy garden'', so beautifully handled that the absence of strings is hardly noticed. The Rapsodie is perhaps less exceptional, although the closing moments of the ''Feria'' are still pretty exciting, while elsewhere the combination of exuberant pianism and the chatter of sticks, skins and steels make for some spectacular effects.
I've purposely avoided quoting 'selected comparisons' (most specifically in the Bartok), because to have done so would have been to miss the point of the programme. Rather, this CD should be considered an inspired 'one-off', where four top-ranking players teamed-up purely for the fun of making wonderful music together. Considered as such, it's a disc in a million.