Martha Argerich - Martha Argerich and Friends: Live from the Lugano Festival 2005 (2006)

With the exception of the Rachmaninoff Suite for Two Pianos, recorded two years earlier, all of this well-filled three-disc program comes from Martha Argerich’s 2005 Lugano Festival. Drawing upon a mix of world famous name artists and young up-and-comers, this annual festival has become one of the music world’s most celebrated and anticipated events.While it is almost unavoidable to encounter some overlap of repertoire and artist with such collections—Argerich recorded both the Rachmaninoff Suite and the Brahms Haydn Variations with Alexandre Rabinovitch for Teldec in 1991 and 1993 respectively—one of the great delights of Lugano is that the programs tend to avoid presenting the same works from year to year simply performed by different players; yet they still maintain logical musical connections to previous festival years. For example, the 2002 festival (reviewed in 27:2) gave us Argerich and the Capuçon brothers in Mendelssohn’s First Piano Trio in D Minor; the current program gives us the composer’s Second Piano Trio, which, incidentally, is in C Minor, not D Minor, as the booklet note lists it. Similarly, the 2002 festival gave us Argerich and Zilberstein in Brahms’s two-piano version of his F-Minor Quintet. Here we get the piece in its better-known quintet version, and to square the circle, as it were, we have Brahms’s two-piano version of his Haydn Variations, better known in its orchestral guise.

Another nice touch is Argerich’s commitment to including a mix of little-known works by famous composers, as well as pieces by composers from Spain and Latin America. In the first instance, we have two howlers, each humorous for different reasons: the 15-year-old Beethoven’s Piano Quartet in C that takes us on a laugh-a-second amusement park ride that exhibits in condensed proto form all of the zany characteristics of the composer’s later music; and one of Mozart’s most famous piano sonatas with an accompanying waif-like counterpoint for a second piano concocted by Grieg. Jeremy Siepmann’s description of it could not be bettered: “a time-warp . . . that has the weird effect of fast-forwarding to Milhaud’s Scaramouche Suite.” In the second instance, we have the Danzas andaluzas by the Spanish-born Manuel Infante (1883–1958) and the Tres romances argentinos by Carlos Guastavino (1912–2000) who hails from Argerich’s native Argentina. The former work, dedicated to José Iturbi, the Spanish pianist who helped further Infante’s career, exudes a strong Flamenco flavor. In Guastavino’s work, composed in 1946, one feels the influence of French Impressionism and Debussy.

The major items on these discs—the Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms—are well represented in the current catalog, and I am not prepared to say that these performances trump the Beaux Arts, Florestan, or Parnassus Trios in the Mendelssohn, Steven Isserlis with Stephen Hough, or Truls Mørk with Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the Rachmaninoff cello sonata; or Rubinstein with the Guarneri Quartet in the Brahms Quintet. Still, there is not one among the lot of these festival performances that is below par. For those who find that recordings of live events (before appreciative but well-behaved audiences) have an extra measure of excitement to them, this set is easily recommended.