Martha Argerich, Charles Dutoit, Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra

On the final day of my stay at the Enescu Festival, she appeared suddenly—framed in gold, as it were, in a packed Ateneum: Martha Argerich. The world’s first pianist, often called simply “Martha,” since no one needs to ask which one. The elusive cat with the mischievous eyes, who cancels concerts as effortlessly as she plays them. But the concert on September 15 in Bucharest went ahead, because beside her stood Charles Dutoit, her former husband (the second one), and, it seems, the only person before whom she dares to be vulnerable. If only you had seen the tenderness with which Dutoit looked at her—and how, after the Ravel Concerto, he kissed her forehead gently, as though blessing her past and present alike. When the ovation thundered on, he embraced her with equal delicacy. It was a beautiful sight.

                                     Photo by Petrica Tanase

No wonder Martha once again displayed the full extent of her legendary freedom at the Enescu Festival—as intuitive as music itself, as unpredictable as jazz. And with jazz she was in her element, for she played Ravel’s Concerto in G—a score laced through with jazz genes (even the semiquaver runs in the right hand against the left’s eighth notes in the finale belong to that lineage). As always, she conjured marvels: the piano under her hands shimmered and rippled, radiant and elusive, sound turned into sfumato, purely “Martha-esque.” Ravel, goaded by his own whip, breathed jazz idioms in the Allegramente and Presto, flaunted bluesy turns, glimmered with impressionist dissonances, whispered riddles. In the Adagio assai, mirages faded into a haze not monochrome but prismatic, forever shifting, fading, glowing again. The cadenza midway through the first movement could easily have slipped from the fingers of Art Tatum or Thelonious Monk. And that Adagio assai itself: Martha wove weightless music, suspended between earth and sky. In the orchestra, the harp spoke to the soul, while the English horn carried on a tender dialogue with the piano.

                                     Photo by Cristina Tanase

Ravel’s G major Concerto is closer to a concertino than a concerto (he wanted something light and witty, he said—believing concertos ought to dazzle rather than brood). Yet it is brilliant, steeped in the fashions of the 1920s, and so finely made that one never thinks to accuse it of frivolity. Ravel himself invoked Mozart (in the slow movement) and Saint-Saëns; the ear also catches Gershwin, Stravinsky, Basque song, the blues—yet always it is Ravel, with his elegance, his cool harmonies, his mix of color and transparency, his meditations, his blurred desires, his faintly hallucinatory imagery.

Forty years after her benchmark 1984 recording with Abbado, Argerich still finds the couleur naturelle of Ravel with ease. Her playing remains fresh, spontaneous, almost improvised; her independence resists the very idea of “interpretation”—she embodies the music instead. Her pianism transports us to the Elysian Fields, from which, as legend has it, one returns with a sharpened ability to detect falsehood. She made Ravel’s harmonic jolts sound anything but ironic; the melancholic waltz at the concerto’s heart was offered with her instinctive musicality and disarming tenderness, as though Satie’s Gymnopédies had been meditated upon by Spartan maidens whose austerity melted into humanity. And in the finale she set such a tempo that for anyone else the details might have dissolved in the whirlwind—but not for Argerich, who dwells somewhere beyond technique.

                                    Photo by Cristina Tanase

These days, the great Martha prefers not to play alone; for the encore she nudged fellow Argentine Nelson Goerner (who had played Ravel’s left-hand concerto earlier in the festival) to join her in four hands. Together they performed the second of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye pieces with exquisite balance. A telling choice: Ravel himself said he wanted “to recreate the poetry of childhood,” and Martha, surely, hails from that country. Earlier, stagehands had placed a music stand on the piano for the four-hands score. But when the audience refused to let her go, she cheekily swept the stand aside—it crashed to the floor—and Martha the Great sat down to dash off her favorite Scarlatti sonata K 141, her trademark.

                                      Photo by Cristina Tanase

Before all this, the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic under Dutoit had given us Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye suite, where the violins in Tom Thumb chirped so vividly that for a moment one thought birds had flown into the hall to stage their own parallel concert. After the interval it was Ravel again, his waltzes both noble and sentimental, and then Debussy with a La mer in which the wind really did blow.

                                      Photo by Petrica Tanase