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Wotan99

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Mar 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM3/27/00
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Martha Argerich: Electricity Onstage, Then a Tumult Off
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
arnegie Hall may not have offered anything quite like this since Vladimir
Horowitz returned to the recital stage in 1965 after a dozen years of
retirement. Here, on Saturday evening, was the electrifying Argentine pianist
Martha Argerich in her first major solo appearance in 19 years.



Steve J. Sherman for The New York Times

The pianist Martha Argerich with members of the Juilliard String Quartet in a
performace of Schumann's Piano Quintet at Carnegie Hall on Saturday.
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Over the last decade Ms. Argerich, now 58, has been treated, apparently
successfully, for melanoma, or skin cancer, which spread to her lymph nodes and
lungs. The recital on Saturday, which included appearances by the Juilliard
String Quartet and Nelson Freire, a Brazilian pianist and old friend of Ms.
Argerich's, was to benefit the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica,
Calif., where the treatments took place.

Even during that troubled decade Ms. Argerich continued to perform concertos,
most recently on March 14 at Carnegie Hall with Charles Dutoit and the
Philadelphia Orchestra. But she was far from a constant presence on the musical
scene even before then, scheduling sparsely and canceling performances often,
sometimes at the last moment and seemingly on a whim.

So it was undoubtedly with some trepidation that the ticketless approached
scalpers on Saturday, and with a considerable sense of relief that a full house
greeted Ms. Argerich's actual appearance onstage. The applause, complete with
foot-stamping, was tumultuous, and a nightful of standing ovations began early,
a Bach partita and two Chopin numbers into the program.

What this listener remembered best from a previous Argerich recital at Carnegie
was, again, a Bach partita. Then, especially as the very propriety of Bach on
the piano was being questioned by the new early-music orthodoxy, Ms. Argerich's
performance seemed willful, wildly individualistic and incomparably exciting.

Now the performance of early music, and of Bach specifically, has won freedom
in many directions, yet Ms. Argerich's performance of the C minor Partita (No.
2) here seemed no less distinctively her own. Her interpretation, freely
modulating between hair-raising virtuosity and gorgeously plush soft playing,
seemed to recognize Bach as the first musical High Romantic if not modern. Or
more simply, the first great musical individualist.

Chopin's Barcarolle and C sharp minor Scherzo alternated similarly, between
blazing bravura and the ultimate in finesse (the ultimate, at least, that can
be made to register in a hall the size of Carnegie), shifting colors at every
moment. As in the Bach it was possible to recall or imagine a different,
perhaps "better," way of stating virtually every phrase: those cascades from
high above in the scherzo, for example, as mere delicate trickles. Yet all such
considerations fell aside as so many irrelevancies in the wake of the
indomitable thrust of Ms. Argerich's pianism.

And then came a work seemingly tailored to her fearless, eruptive style,
Prokofiev's B flat Sonata (No. 7), in which she savored the haunted moments as
well as the clangorous ones. Again, with any deliberation at all she could have
made more of the manic ostinato figure that sets the finale in motion, but her
blistering romp through that movement carried a logic of its own, or would have
if one had had time to think, or even breathe.

Despite the attention of so many listeners trained on her every gesture, Ms.
Argerich professes to feel lonely in solo performance. So the second half of
the evening became a party of sorts. In Schumann's burly Piano Quintet, the
Juilliard String Quartet was energized: more so, probably, than ever before in
its present conformation (with Joel Smirnoff and Ronald Copes, violinists;
Samuel Rhodes, violist; and Joel Krosnick, cellist), now a few years old.

At that, these veterans of many a chamber music battle seemed at times to be
hanging on by their fingernails, laboring to keep up with the tireless Ms.
Argerich's pace and to match the intensity of her sound. This performance, not
always pretty but everywhere highly charged, made the work sound like a fifth
Schumann symphony, the way an old recording by Sviatoslav Richter and the
Borodin Quartet made the Piano Quintet by Brahms sound like his Fifth Symphony.


In "La Valse," by Ravel, and two encores, Ms. Argerich was joined by Mr.
Freire, a longtime collaborator. In this partnership, too, Ms. Argerich sets
the tone, and the unity is one of spirit rather than letter, with a perfect
unison sometimes sacrificed to a spirited turn of phrase or burst of energy.

The encores were another Valse, from Rachmaninoff's Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos,
and "Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes" from Ravel's "Ma Mère l'Oye" for
one piano, four hands: some eight minutes of music. For the rest of a half-hour
after the concert the audience supplied the noise, as lusty as it was long.
Only after the houselights had been raised and the stage lights dimmed several
times over did listeners disperse, many, no doubt, to raise a glass to Ms.
Argerich's continued good health.


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