Argerich, Martha

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MARTHA ARGERICH

Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina, 5 June 1941

Genre: Classical

Martha Argerich is one of the most sought-after piano virtuosos of our time. That she seems to treat her career playing the piano as an imposition rather than a reward only seems to make her more appealing to fans. Her concert schedule is pocked with cancellations, often at the last minute, but her cachet is so strong that, in a business that typically books its artists years in advance she is often able to schedule performances on short notice.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argerich made her concert debut at the age of five and performed at the Teatro Astral and Teatro Colon while still a child. At the age of fourteen, she moved with her mother to Vienna, where she studied with Friedrich Gulda, Nikita Magaloff, and, briefly, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

In 1957, at the age of sixteen, Argerich handily won the Geneva International Piano Competition and the Busoni Piano Competition; the resulting recognition led to a whirlwind of European concerts. In 1960 she made her first recording, a collection of pieces by Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Ravel, and Prokofiev; critics favorably compared the album to historic Horowitz recordings. But, just as her career was taking off, Argerich took a break, complaining of fatigue.

She moved to New York and stopped playing the piano for a year, emerging in 1965 to make her London debut and compete in the Warsaw International Chopin Competition, which she easily won. Winning one of the world's top piano competitions put her squarely back into the international concert circuit. Resuming her concert and recording career, she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1965 and has been at the top of the piano world ever since.

Argerich's volatility has loomed large in both her career and personal life. She was married to conductor Pierre Dutoit from 1969 to 1974, and the two have been longtime musical collaborators. She has three children by three different men. She stopped performing solo in the early 1980s, and, in the middle of the decade, she took a two-year break from all performing. When she returned

to the stage, it was with orchestras and chamber music collaborators. The cutback in her performances only made each concert more prized as an event. When she finally performed solo again—at Carnegie Hall on March 25, 2000—the concert was the talk of the music world. It had been nineteen years since she had performed solo.

Though she seems to dislike performing in concerts, Argerich has recorded extensively: Her resume boasts more than fifty albums for Deutsche Grammophon, Teldec, RCA, EMI, Philips, and Sony. Her recordings, highly prized by collectors, cut across the piano repertoire: solo pieces and collaborations with full orchestra and chamber ensembles. In 1999 her recording of Prokofiev's Concertos Nos. 1 and 3 and Bartok's Concerto No. 3 with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony won a Grammy. In 2001 she was named Musical America's Musician of the Year.

Argerich's appeal is not difficult to understand. Her performances are charismatic, but in a way that draws attention to the music rather than herself. A listener feels her connecting to the music, exploring novel expressive paths rather than retreading familiar ones. Her musical instincts are harnessed to a prodigious technique that allows her the freedom to explore.