Carnegie Hall

From the controlled finesse of a Bach partita to the frenzied excitement of a Rachmaninoff concerto, Martha Argerich brings brilliance to a variety of works. Once described as “a legend of the classical music world” by The Washington Post who plays “brilliantly, ferociously and, perhaps, better than anyone else on earth,” the Buenos Aires–born pianist had a quick rise as a solo musician and proved herself a popular collaborator from the 1980s onward.

Today, the famously media-shy artist has secured her place as an icon of iconoclasm, a keyboard wizard whose far-reaching virtuosity has made fans of each of her rivals. This month on Carnegie Hall+, we shine a light on the woman who defined 20th-century piano performance, with six transmissions now available for on-demand streaming.

Argerich was born in 1941, the offspring of Spaniards who had been based in Buenos Aires since the 1700s and Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. A prodigy who started learning piano at the age of three, Argerich began cleaning up at the world’s most prestigious piano competitions in her early teens, winning the Geneva, Busoni, and Chopin competitions within a single decade. Despite her failed early attempt at studying with her idol, Vladimir Horowitz, she displayed many of his gifts early on: a trademark intensity, a vast color palette, an uncanny ear for both Baroque masters and Modernists, and a relentless perfectionism that has followed her everywhere.

“I remember when I was nine, I was playing the D-Minor (Concerto) of Mozart,” she once recalled to Gramophone. “I went to the bathroom, I knelt down, and I said, ‘If I make a mistake, I will die!’ … This is not the problem of the audience exactly. I don’t quite know what my problem with performing in public is.”

She brings this youthful vigor to many of her performances, and writers have spent careers trying to match the vitality of her music making with their words. “With Argerich, each note is both distinct and part of a longer line—each glistens like dew on a spiderweb,” one critic raved of her landmark 1961 debut recording for Deutsche Grammophon, a recital that contains benchmark performances of Brahms, Chopin, Prokofiev, and Ravel. “Magnificent.”

Argerich made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1974 with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major (a specialty) alongside the Minnesota Orchestra and conductor Stanisław Skrowaczewski, and has since returned for an additional 27 performances. The following year, a pair of concerts with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal floored critics, with The New Yorker writing that “she rescued Tchaikovsky’s warhorse from the usual virtuoso bludgeoning and restored its sense of aristocratic play ... It came out sounding like new music, contemporary music, radical tonality.”

Still, Argerich maintains she is “lonely” as a soloist—“It's really a very obsessive situation when you are alone onstage playing on your own,” she once told The New York Times—and so she has focused much of her later artistry on chamber music and championing other instrumentalists. A sampling of this teamwork can be experienced on Carnegie Hall+, where Argerich can be heard in a 2008 performance of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto alongside brothers Renaud and Gautier Capuçon, Gustavo Dudamel, and his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. Four other titles showcase her lifelong partnership with conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, including a towering 2016 performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 from the BBC Proms, an assortment of four-hand sonatas and variations by Mozart, and a four-hand arrangement of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye.

“From the beginning, she wasn’t … only concerned with dexterity and speed,” Barenboim has remarked of his friend. “She mastered those as well, of course, but her fantasy enabled her to create a very unique quantity and quality of sounds on the piano.”

In her efforts to pass the torch, Argerich has served as president of the International Piano Academy Lake Como and performed regular engagements at the Lugano Festival in Switzerland. She has also created and been a general director of the Argerich Music Festival and Meeting Point in Beppu, Japan, since 1996. Her output has been formative for many musicians who have come after her. Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov cites seeing her perform R. Schumann in Moscow as one of his profound early experiences. And Icelandic keyboardist Víkingur Ólafsson has told The New York Times that Argerich remains something of a personal hero for him, marveling at her “extraordinary precision and clarity while having four or five things going at the same time.”

With so many respected artists laying praise, it can be easy to lose sight of the many concertgoers who continue to line up for tickets to see her. On Carnegie Hall+, subscribers can now experience Argerich beyond the concert hall and catch what makes her great no matter the time of day.

Photography: Martha Argerich by Jennifer Taylor