Legendary Argerich Offers Wonderful Birthday Gift

There are many stellar pianists today, but no superstars, no household names. There is, however, one near-legend.

Martha Argerich, the 56-year-old pianist from Buenos Aires, doesn’t appear very often. She has released but a handful of solo recordings. She is most likely to be found playing or recording with a favorite colleague, most notably violinist Gidon Kremer. She may show up as soloist with an orchestra in the handful of concertos she specializes in. But she is just as likely to cancel. The UCLA Center for Performing Arts has tried for years, I’m told, to book her. The last time she performed in Los Angeles was a decade ago, touring with Kremer.

Yet Thursday night, Argerich did appear at UCLA and not in the deluxe Royce Hall, which had just celebrated its reopening after four years of renovation the night before with the premiere of the Philip Glass and Robert Wilson opera “Monsters of Grace 1.0.” Rather she turned up in the modest, utilitarian 500-seat Schoenberg Hall. Tickets weren’t required. All anyone had to do was walk in.

The occasion was a concert in celebration of the 70th birthday of Vitaly Margulis, a Russian pianist who joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Music five years ago. Argerich had apparently taken an interest in a piano sonata by Margulis, which she heard when he lived in Freiburg (he emigrated first to Germany in 1974), and friendship ensued. The concert consisted of a parade of five of Margulis’ UCLA students in the first half; Argerich then accompanied his daughter, cellist Natasha Margulis, and played piano duets with his son, Jura Margulis. It was extraordinary.

Adjectives tend to fly when Argerich is described. “Feral” is a frequent one and probably the best. She exhibits the rarest thing of all in performance--less a sense of oneness with the instrument than with the music. Certainly, she is a commanding virtuoso, and she has a range of colors and variety of touch that keeps a listener continually amazed. But more importantly she gives the impression of transcending the piano altogether in the sheer exhilaration and vividness of her playing.

She appeared to be having a very good time Thursday. She did little to accommodate the young musicians who, though accomplished, were of more modest personality. She took them on a wild ride, and the more she made them sweat, the more she smiled and laughed. An impulsive player, she was a wound spring in Chopin’s Polonaise Brilliante for cello and piano. But also fanatic for detail, she lobbed exquisitely sketched phrases with a juggler’s skill over to her partner in Mozart’s Theme and Variation for piano, four hands.

The big work was the “Nutcracker” Suite, arranged for two pianos by Nicolas Economou. It is a stunning arrangement, offering a glittery brilliance of sound more modern and very different from Tchaikovsky’s orchestration. The arrangement ended up having special significance Thursday. It is family music, dedicated to Argerich’s daughter, Stephanie, and Economou’s daughter, Semele. But it also served as a startling reminder of something else. Economou was an extraordinarily versatile composer, conductor and pianist from Cyprus, who died at age 40 in 1993. And the day after UCLA finally gave Los Angeles its first Robert Wilson opera, UCLA finally gave Los Angeles some music by the composer of the first segment of Wilson’s unrealized Los Angeles opera. In the same year, 1983, that he made the Tchaikovsky arrangement and recorded it with Argerich, Economou provided the music for the Dutch segment of Wilson’s “the CIVIL warS.”

There was another surprise Thursday. The five Margulis students--Axel Schmitt, Rosemary O’Connor, Judy Huang, Maria Fomina and Sergei Podobedov--impressed not just with large techniques, but by the grand range of personalities that came through in the music. Huang is a quicksilver player who is already one of UCLA’s rising young stars. Podobedov, a young undergraduate who gave an outrageously twitchy and amusingly overwrought performance of Scriabin’s Fourth Sonata, bears watching.

And this exposure for talented students to a large and appreciative audience (the hall was well filled but no one was turned away) was perhaps the nicest present of all that Argerich offered to Margulis. Argerich is scheduled to perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in April 1999. The concerto is still to be announced, but that hardly matters. Plan early.