Argerich plays CHOPIN = Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23; Etude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 10, No. 4; 5 Mazurkas; Nocturne in Major, Op. 15, No. 1; Nocturne in E-flat Major, OP. 55, No. 2; 3 Mazurkas, Op. 59; Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58 – Martha Argerich, piano
DGG B0013960-02, 64:25 ****:
Culled from various studio and live Berlin and Cologne recital sources in 1959 and 1967, this disc assembles previously unpublished performances by Argentinian virtuoso Martha Argerich (b. 1941) of the music of Chopin. And who better to perform this music than she, who won the 1965 seventh International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw?
Argerich opens with a towering reading from RIAS of the G Minor Ballade (26 January 1959), Chopin’s answer to Beethoven Appassionata Sonata. Even at eighteen years of age, Argerich could render alternately volcanic and velvet sonorities, and the Neapolitan furies of this piece permit her every graduated nuance of expression. The tension of her periods, their inner pulsation of advance and hesitation, proves quite the emotional avalanche, the last pages raining fire. No less audacious is the C-sharp Minor Etude, the 16th notes threatening to fly into outer space, the series of seventh chords disturbing our universe with an incensed march.
Argerich plays a mazurka group (3 December 1967) that begins with two of the Op. 41, in C-sharp Minor and E Minor. Argerich makes the first a bold dance in aggressive colors, the triple rhythm itself plastic and protean. The keyboard patina is hard as granite, but the crystalline tracery of the Polish national spirit remains. The E Minor could be Chopin’s response to Schumann’s Prophet Bird, haunted and quizzical. The coy C Major, Op. 24, No. 2 could inspire a nationalist like Dvorak for a hundred years, and Argerich does not spare the velocity. The F Minor, Op. 63, No. 2 brings a veil of mystery to the equation, flecked with erotic nostalgia. The eternal D Major, Op. 33, No. 2 presents extroverted Polish zal in its brightest colors, Argerich having cast it forward as confident nationalism and knotty etude at once.
That Argerich has access to Romantic innigkeit shines forth in the luminous F Major Nocturne in 2/4 whose middle section erupts into an F Minor summer storm. The E-flat Nocturne, a Lento sostenuto in 12/8, conveys a hothouse temperament, a self-contained song whose riffs circle us like eddies of painful nostalgia from which we choose not to be rescued. The late 1845 set of mazurkas, Op. 59 (31 October 1967) synthesize Chopin’s advanced harmonic freedom with his national spirit: the opening A Minor thick, polyphonic, sporadically passionate. The brief A-flat Major instantiates the sense of sweet dalliance, Zsa Zsa Gabor in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. Argerich’s potent left hand makes the F-sharp Minor a tour de force, its waltz figures competing with the hasty concessions to the basic mazurka pulse.
Last, in live performance from the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, the epic B Minor Sonata (15 March 1967), whose nobility and poetry of soul initial every page. Much in the spirit of the legendary Dinu Lipatti, Argerich takes the long line, the first movement Allegro maestoso always moving to a preconceived point. Argerich takes the repeat, adding to the scale of this discursive and impulsive work and its flashing moments of ornamental lightning in the bass trills and florid high runs. The E-flat Scherzo skitters by in the form of mercurial dust-devil. Attacca to the profound Largo in B Major, a sustained nocturne of incomparable beauty touched with hints of imminent tragedy. Rarely have B Minor and B Major enjoyed a more Manichean struggle than under Argerich’s gifted hands for the titanic finale of this grand sonata. Passionate, fiendishly driven, inspired, the entire recital has already become indispensable to the Argerich legacy.
–Gary Lemco
