Martha Argerich reviews

This is Martha Argerich’s third recording of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto – and I can confidently say the best. Recorded live in Warsaw in 2006, just two months after her acclaimed performance in Lugano (on Warner), Argerich, her fellow soloist, trumpeter Jakub Waszezeniuk, and the Sinfonia Varsovia under Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, present an even more polished, spontaneous and characterful account, yet avoiding those moments of over self-conscious point making to be found in the Lugano version.

There’s a wealth of expression to be drawn out of every note in the slow opening of Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony – at least as shaped by Sir Antonio Pappano, live in concert with his non-operatic orchestra in Rome.

This is the last of Warner’s annual gleanings from the Lugano Festival at which Martha Argerich presides – and definitely the most exciting. She may be 76, but her playing has lost none of its phenomenal precision and brilliance; it’s a rare pleasure to hear her playing solo in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, which she has never before committed to disc. In every shared track she induces her ‘friends’ – including the excellent Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana – to raise their game to a level with hers.

Martha Argerich’s festival with friends and former pupils in Lugano has become an annual event since its foundation in 2002. The 2009 Festival, as enshrined in the live performances on these three discs, seems to have given more space to unfamiliar repertoire than in previous years, such as the rarely-encountered Mendelssohn Piano Sextet, which despite its misleadingly high opus number is yet another work of genius from his mid-teens.