Latest news with #Argerich
The Mainichi
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Mainichi
Renowned pianist Martha Argerich says dialogue vital for world peace
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Famed Argentina-born pianist Martha Argerich says engaging in dialogue to share cultural differences plays a major role in building peace, as she experienced firsthand during her first performance with a Japanese Noh actor. Cultural exchange "is very important, and it's the source of peace in the world...I think that dialogue is the most important factor in this type of thing," Argerich said at a recent press conference at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo. Bunzo Otsuki, a government-designated living national treasure, performed Noh to Argerich's rendition of Bach's Partita No.2 at a Noh theater in 2022 and their performance is featured in a new documentary film titled "Encounter." "I was very surprised. I was able to act to the sound of Argerich's playing with ease," Otsuki said at the press conference held to announce the completion of the documentary. Argerich said it "was a wonderful dialogue" to share their cultures and forms of expression through their performance of Bach's music and Noh on stage, as well as through backstage lectures from Otsuki about Noh masks. "I was always very fascinated by Noh theater. This time, I felt really honored and grateful to share the stage with Maestro Otsuki," Argerich said, adding that Bach's music goes with anything because it contains the essence of human spirit and ways of expression. Since she won first prize at the prestigious International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in 1965, which established her reputation, Argerich has been one of the world's most prominent pianists, receiving the Legion of Honor, France's most prestigious award at the rank of commander in 2023, according to the Argerich Arts Foundation. Argerich recently visited Japan to play for a music festival named after her, Music Festival Argerich's Meeting Point in Beppu, which marked its 25th anniversary this year. She serves as general director of the festival in Oita Prefecture, southwestern Japan.
New York Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Martha Argerich, the Elusive, Enigmatic ‘Goddess' of the Piano
The pianist Martha Argerich had just delivered an electrifying performance on a snowy night in northern Switzerland. Fans were lining up backstage for autographs, and friends were bringing roses and chrysanthemums to her dressing room. But Argerich, who at 83 is still one of the world's most astonishing pianists, with enough finger strength to shatter chestnuts or make a Steinway quiver, was nowhere to be seen. She had slipped out a door to smoke a Gauloises cigarette. 'I want to hide,' she said outside the Stadtcasino concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, shrinking beneath her billowy gray hair. 'For a moment, I don't want to be a pianist. Now, I am someone else.' As she smoked, Argerich, one of classical music's most elusive and enigmatic artists, obsessed about how she had played the opening flourish of Schumann's piano concerto that evening with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana. (Her verdict: 'not so good.') And she became transfixed by the memory of performing the concerto for the first time, as an 11-year-old in Buenos Aires, her hometown. There, at the Teatro Colón in 1952, a conductor whose name was seared into her memory — Washington Castro — had offered a warning. Never forget, he said: Strange things happen to pianists who play the Schumann concerto. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Argerich/Maisky/Ivanov review – legendary pianist brings her irrepressible brilliance to chamber music programme
Any concert involving Martha Argerich is a special event. The promise of hearing the pianist doing what one suspects she enjoys most these days – playing chamber music with old friends – meant that the queue for returns spilled out on to the pavement. Here, that old friend was the cellist Mischa Maisky, with whom Argerich has been collaborating for almost half a century, and they were joined by the violinist Yossif Ivanov. Maisky had only returned to the concert platform three weeks ago after serious illness and looked rather frail. There were moments when his playing seemed to lack assertiveness, too. Not so much in the Bach cello suite with which he opened the concert, the G major BWV1007, which a few moments of roughness apart, had an easy fluency, but in the two piano trios that he played with his colleagues, in which the cello line sometimes seemed to get submerged. Yet his shaping of solos in the slow movements of both Haydn's G major 'Gypsy Rondo' piano trio and Mendelssohn's D minor Trio was certainly eloquent, and matched beautifully to Ivanov's equally elegant violin. They were touching too in the piano-trio arrangement of Schubert's song Du Bist die Ruh, which was added as an encore. And then there was Argerich. Whether adding fizz to the outer movements of the Haydn or inexorably building up the momentum in the first movement of Mendelssohn after Maisky had launched it rather prosaically, she was irrepressible, and the downward scale with which she signed off that trio's scherzo, every note perfectly articulated at dizzying speed, was almost worth the price of a ticket on its own. And there was one special treat. While Argerich has become a reasonably regular visitor to London over the last decade or so as a concerto soloist, with occasional performances in chamber music or in music for two pianos, it is more than 30 years since she gave a solo recital in the capital. But to begin the second half of this concert she appeared alone on stage to launch into Bach's C minor Partita, BWV826, introduced with almost theatrical grandeur in its opening Sinfonia, and the following movements played with scarcely a pause between them. Wonderfully supple and fleet, it was fabulously instinctive Bach playing – if not perhaps to the taste of baroque purists. Above all it was a reminder that, even at 83, Argerich can light up a concert in a way no other pianist can.
