In these difficult moments, let's take comfort and celebrate Chopin's anniversary with a video of one of the most legendary performances in the entire history of Carnegie Hall
PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THAT VIDEO ON INSTAGRAM THANK YOU!
Chopin : Barcarolle, op.60 and Scherzo n.3 in C Sharp Minor op.39
Martha Argerich, Carnegie Hall, New York, March 25th, 2000
New York Times Review :
MUSIC REVIEW; Electricity Onstage, Then a Tumult Off
By James R. Oestreich
March 27, 2000
Carnegie 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.
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.
...... 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 heal.