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.
First, and arguably foremost, there is Argerich’s Chopin. From her he is hardly the most balanced or classically biased of the romantics. Argerich can tear all complacency aside. Indeed her way with the 24 Preludes achieves a storm of contradictions. Mood follows mood, flashing and alternating like the play of the elements themselves. Nos. 18 and 22 show her at her most precipitate, while No. 16 (with that startling left-hand inaccuracy at bar 5 – a rare spot on Argerich’s sun) is all brilliant fury. You may question her way with the climax of the elegiac No. 4 (does Chopin’s stretto really signify such a sudden squall?) or a touch of recklessness in No. 3 (where a gentle April shower becomes a torrential downpour) yet her overall response could hardly be more vivid. Her fitful rubato adds a touch of neurosis to the cloudy and disconsolate progressions of Op. 45 and her Barcarolle, whether you see it as a marinescape or a Venetian lagoon, is as fevered and convulsive as, say, Lipatti’s regal recording is translucent and serene (EMI, 7/89). How she keeps you on the qui vivre in the Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3. Is the Funeral March too brisk, an expression of sadness for the death of a distant relative rather than grief for a nation? Is the delicate rhythmic play at the heart of the Third Sonata’s Scherzo virtually spun out of existence? Such qualms or queries tend to be whirled into extinction by more significant felicities. Who but Argerich, with her subtle half-pedalling, could conjure so baleful and macabre a picture of “winds whistling over graveyards” in the Second Sonata’s finale, or achieve such heart-stopping exultance in the final pages of the Third Sonata (this performance is early Argerich with a vengeance, alive with a nervous brio that at once alerted Horowitz to her facility and temperament).
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.'