Schumann Argerich

EMI Classics is pleased to release the latest instalment of highlights from the Martha Argerich Project at the Lugano Festival. This is the ninth annual 3-CD set celebrating the musical fruits of a project in which young artists join seasoned performers, including Martha Argerich herself, to explore wide-ranging chamber music and orchestral repertoire, both well known and rarely heard.

Martha Argerich has been criticized (once in a while) for sacrificing the spirit of the music she performs for the sake of sheer virtuosity, for which she is mostly famous. Not this time. As a person with a particular fondness for Schumann (maybe due to a mental illness, which, like Schumann, her family was no stranger to), she feels his music acutely and precisely.

The connections between Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim run deeper than the fact that they are both Argentines; Argerich studied with Vincenzo Scaramuzza, who also taught Barenboim's father, and the pianists both have Russian-Jewish-Argentine ancestry. They have the kind of instinctive understanding, coming from shared experiences, that makes for successful duo piano work, and that sets this live recording apart from the majority of superstar pairings.

This boxed set is a veritable treasure trove, an embarrassment of riches, a golden hoard - you come up with the cliché and I’ll accept it. Released along with other sets to celebrate her 70th birthday it is a remarkable musical record of fabulous achievement packed with superlative performances that simply take the breath away.

Delivered in a limpid tone and with neat fingerwork, Argerich’s 1978 account of the Piano Concerto is characteristically resolute. Though she enjoys its moments of display, her sympathy with its poetic moods is keen. She also listens to the orchestra, which provides some attractive woodwind solos. Her accompanist, Rostropovich, is a good listener too, and doubtless the better for being a soloist himself, as in the 1961 performance of the Cello Concerto under the supportive Rozhdestvensky. A curiously sketchy work, the Concerto’s inward qualities receive passionate treatment, though the sound is rough.

The name of Martha Argerich on any label always means fire, and so it is here. She and Gidon Kremer play with quite exceptional urgency and temperament, and the bright, clear recording brings up both instruments with a sheen. In fact the music springs at you with such immediacy that anyone previously of the opinion that Schumann was showing signs of tiredness in these latish works will be compelled to think again.