Martha Argerich, born June 5, 1941 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is the pianist known for her recordings and performances of chamber music, particularly of works by Olivier Messiaen, Sergey Prokofiev, and Sergey Rachmaninoff.
A prodigy, Argerich was performing professionally by age eight. In 1955 she went to Europe, where her teachers included Friedrich Gulda and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. She won two prestigious competitions in 1957 at age 16: the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition. In 1965 she won the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. The next year she made her debut in the United States in the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. Her exceptionally brilliant technique, emotional depth, and élan won her an enthusiastic international following. She performed around the world and dedicated most of her career to collaborative chamber music, notably with Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, with whom she produced a number of award-winning recordings. Other musicians with whom she performed and recorded include pianists Alexandre Rabinovitch and Nelson Freire and cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Mischa Maisky.
Argerich was the recipient of many honours and prizes, including three Grammy Awards (1999 and 2005 [best instrumental soloist performance (with orchestra)] and 2004 [best chamber music performance]). In 2005 she received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music and the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese government. Beginning in 1999 a piano competition in her name was held annually in Buenos Aires, and from 2001 she directed a music festival in her name, also in Buenos Aires. In 2016 she received a Kennedy Center Honor, an American award that celebrates the arts.
Source: Btitannica
Martha Argerich is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Unusually, her genius reveals itself mostly in collaborations: with orchestras and conductors in concertos, and with chamber musicians.
Of Catalan and Russian Jewish background, Argerich was born in Buenos Aires on June 5, 1941. She started piano lessons at five and made rapid progress, performing concertos by Mozart and Beethoven flawlessly just three years later. Her family moved to Switzerland in 1955, and she studied with Madeleine Lipatti, Nikita Magaloff, and then, for 18 months, with Friedrich Gulda in Vienna after Argentine president Juan Perón arranged for diplomatic work for her family there. Argerich won the Geneva International Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition in 1957, and she made a well-regarded debut album in 1960, featuring music by Liszt, Prokofiev, Ravel, Brahms, and Chopin. However, her real breakthrough was a first prize at the Chopin International Festival in Warsaw in 1965; she was the first pianist from the Western hemisphere to triumph, and the win brought publicity similar to that which attended Van Cliburn’s International Tchaikovsky Competition victory in Moscow in 1958.
After her early years, Argerich rarely gave solo concerts, sometimes saying that she felt lonely on-stage. She recorded concertos, mostly from the late Romantic and early modern periods, with most of the major European conductors. Argerich began a long association with the Deutsche Grammophon label in the 1970s, and her 1975 release featuring concertos by Prokofiev and Ravel, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado, had an iconic cover photo showing the two in intense conversation. Her 1985 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, was another classic. Dutoit was one of Argerich’s three husbands; before him came composer Robert Chen, and after him pianist Stephen Kovacevich, and she had children with all three. Argerich recovered from a 1990 bout with malignant melanoma and a 1995 recurrence; she was cured by an experimental treatment at the John Wayne Cancer Institute and performed a Carnegie Hall concert to benefit the Institute. She has continued to give widely praised concerto performances into senior citizenhood, appearing at the BBC Proms in 2016 with conductor Daniel Barenboim in the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major. She has also been an enthusiastic performer of chamber music and duo sonatas, appearing and recording with Kovacevich, pianist Nelson Freire, violinist Gidon Kremer, and other choice players. In her later years, Argerich was widely known for her leadership of the Progetto Martha Argerich at the Lugano Festival in Switzerland, where she performed with and nurtured the careers of many young musicians. That festival came to an end in 2016 after its sponsor was investigated for possible violations of Swiss banking laws, but in 2018, she curated a new festival mounted by the Hamburg Philharmonic, and she has continued to serve as director of the Argerich Music Festival in Beppu, Japan, which she created in 1996. In 2019, she had a busy schedule of concerts across Britain, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Her concerts generally take up the mainstream of the concerto and chamber repertory, from Mozart to the early 20th century, but she has performed more contemporary music by her compatriot Alberto Ginastera, Witold Lutoslawski, and others.
Argerich has continued to record for Deutsche Grammophon but has also appeared on Warner, Decca, and other labels. Her recording pace has hardly slowed in her 60s and 70s; in the year 2015 alone, 11 separate Argerich recordings appeared (some were reissues of earlier material). In 2020, Argerich was heard on a new recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19, with conductor Seiji Ozawa and his Mito Chamber Orchestra in Japan. By that time, her catalog included at least 175 recordings.
By James Manheim / Source: all music
Martha Argerich
Pianista argentina considerada una de las mejores del mundo. Nació en Buenos Aires, comenzó a estudiar a los 3 años y a los 8 dio su primer concierto. En 1965 obtuvo el primer premio en el certamen internacional más importante: el Federico Chopin, que se realiza en Varsovia, Polonia.
Martha Argerich nació en Buenos Aires el 5 de junio de 1941. Su ascendencia paterna proviene de españoles catalanes afincados en la Argentina en el siglo XVIII y la de su madre, Juana Heller, de una familia judía ucraniana establecida en la Argentina huyendo de los pogromos del siglo XX. En 1945, con sólo cuatro años de edad da su primer recital público de piano, en el Teatro Astral. A los siete años de edad da su primer concierto formal en el Teatro Astral, en el que interpreta el Concierto para piano y orquesta n.º 20 en re menor, K. 466, de Mozart,,1 y comienza a estudiar piano con Vicente Scaramuzza (también maestro de Bruno Gelber, entre otros).
A principios de 1954, el presidente argentino Juan Domingo Perón la recibió en la residencia presidencial:
Yo tenía un poco más de 12 años, había tocado en el Teatro Colón, y Perón me había dado una cita en la residencia presidencial. Mamá preguntó si podía acompañarme y le dijeron que sí, por supuesto. Yo no era muy peronista; me acuerdo de que siempre estaba pegando por todos lados papelitos que decían «Balbín-Frondizi». Perón nos recibió y me preguntó: «¿Y adónde querés ir, ñatita?». Y yo quería ir a Viena, para estudiar con Friedrich Gulda. A él le gustó que no quisiera ir a Estados Unidos. Lo más cómico fue que mi mamá, para congraciarse, le dijo que a mí me encantaría tocar un concierto en la UES [Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios]. Y parece que yo debo haber puesto una cara bastante reveladora de que la idea no me gustaba, porque Perón le empezó a seguir la corriente a mamá, diciéndole «por supuesto señora, vamos a organizarlo», mientras me guiñaba un ojo y, por debajo de la mesa, me hacía con un dedo que no. Él la estaba cargando a mamá y a mí me tranquilizaba. Se dio cuenta de que yo no quería. Fantástico, ¿no? Y le dio un trabajo a mi papá. Lo nombró agregado económico en Viena. Y a mamá le dijo que le parecía que ella también era muy inteligente, emprendedora y capaz y le consiguió otro puesto en la embajada.
Desde 1954, en Viena (Austria), Argerich estudió durante dieciocho meses con Friedrich Gulda -quien ha sido su maestro más influyente-. Después estudió en Ginebra con Madeleine Lipatti y Nikita Magaloff. Luego fue alumna de Stefan Askenase y María Curcio, y en 1960 fue alumna de Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.
Vida personal
Martha Argerich tiene tres hijas: la mayor, Lyda, que ha empezado a destacar como violista, es concebida con Robert Chen, violinista taiwanés. Charles Dutoit también violinista y director de orquesta, es el padre de la segunda hija, Annie. El pianista Stephen Kovacevich, es el padre de Stephanie, la tercera de las hijas de Argerich, quien ha debutado recientemente como cineasta presentando en el Festival de Cine de Roma su ópera prima Bloody Daughter, que trata sobre la vida de su madre.
Uno de sus amigos más cercanos es el pianista brasileño Nelson Freire, que la acompaña frecuentemente en dúos de piano.
Argerich reside desde 1954 en Europa, habitualmente en Bruselas.
Carreira profesional
En 1957, ganó dos prestigiosos concursos de piano con tres semanas de diferencia, siendo estos el Premio Busoni de Bolzano y el Concurso de Ginebra. Más tarde, en 1965 obtuvo el primer premio en el Concurso Internacional de Piano Frédéric Chopin, reconocida por sus interpretaciones de Chopin y Liszt.
En varios reportajes Argerich ha remarcado su sentimiento de soledad en el escenario durante la interpretación, y -quizá por ello- realizó muy pocos recitales de piano solista después de 1980, enfocándose en conciertos para piano y orquesta, música de cámara y acompañamiento instrumental en sonatas.
Ha sido reconocida especialmente por sus interpretaciones de compositores clásicos del siglo XX, tales como Serguéi Rajmáninov, Olivier Messiaen y Serguéi Prokófiev. Una de sus grabaciones más notables reúne al Concierto para piano n.º 3 de Rajmáninov con el Concierto para piano n.º 1 de Piotr Ilich Chaikovski
Obtuvo tres premios Grammy, en los años 2000, 2005 y 2006.
En el Teatro Colón de Buenos Aires se lleva a cabo anualmente el Festival Martha Argerich, en el cual se ofrecen conciertos por músicos e intérpretes de diferentes partes del mundo, y además se celebra un concurso de piano en el cual Argerich a menudo preside el jurado.
FUENTE: Todo Argentina
Sila Blume 
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