Martha Argerich

Martha Argerich: Argentine pianist. Her teachers were Ernestine de Kussrow, Vicente Scaramuzza, Gulda, Askenase, Michelangeli, Madeleine Lipatti and Magaloff.

She made her début at the age of eight in Buenos Aires performing Mozart’s D minor Concerto k466, Beethoven’s First Concerto and Bach’s French Suite no.5. She also played the finale of Beethoven’s E flat Sonata op.31 no.3 for Gieseking, who expressed his unease at the possible dangers of such early precosity. Argerich achieved her first international recognition at the age of 16 when she won first prizes in the 1957 Busoni and Geneva international competitions. She made her London début in 1964, and in 1965 won first prize in the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where her playing was described as ‘volcanic’. Yet even before Warsaw she recorded, at the age of 19, an album for DG which included performances of the Prokofiev Toccata and Liszt’s Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody sufficiently fluent and imperious to arouse Horowitz’s wonder. Since that time Argerich’s appearances have been notoriously unpredictable; perhaps surprisingly, she has been most frequently heard in chamber music, notably in partnership with Nelson Freire, Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich, Gidon Kremer and Mischa Maisky. Her appearances in the concerto repertory are rare, and her solo recitals even rarer, although such absenteeism is less the result of caprice than an instinct for survival and a refusal to compromise. She has remained wary of a return to a brilliant but fraught career which saw her making as many as 150 appearances a year and which increasingly left her more exhausted than elated. Argerich’s recorded legacy is, however, surprisingly large and varied; and here her fiery virtuosity is invariably combined with an acutely poetic lyricism. Whether in her superbly disciplined Bach, her joyous, volatile early Beethoven concertos or her highly charged playing of the Romantic repertory – of Tchaikovsky, Skryabin and Rachmaninoff as well as Chopin, Schumann and Liszt – Argerich’s performances are as inward as they are vital, of a unique musical intuition and charisma.