Clearly this man is a fool. I think someone should slip him a recording of the Liszt sonata, of which a particular review states as follows (it should be noted that this is a far more typical reaction to Argerich's playing):
I find her account of the Liszt sonata stunning at all levels. Obviously, her hands have mastered the notes. However, her ability to find the music in all the notes amazes me. I should say that I've never particularly liked the Liszt sonata, or any 19th-century sonata after Schubert. The Liszt in particular has always seemed to me a compendium of cliches and over-reliance on diminished triads and sequence. I've heard Horowitz's EMI recording, Brendel, and Arau. I've not heard my two all-time favorite Lisztians, Cziffra and Howard, in this particular work and, in fact, don't know whether recorded performances exist. Schwann is silent.
The Liszt bears as much resemblance to classical sonata form as a platypus does to a duck. The trick for the pianist is to overcome the obviously sectional nature of the work and make the listener forget that each section is more than a rush to another climax - a tall order, since that's practically Liszt's entire rhetorical strategy. Under hands only vaguely connected to the brain, the piece comes off as a garage sale of spare parts. Argerich shows you how Liszt builds an impressive structure from two or three little bits, not even full-fledged themes, and how the composer's incredible sonic imagination (allied, I'm sure, to his miraculous technique) inventively transforms these bits into new themes, rhythms, and textures. One reads about this in essays on the subject, but Argerich is the first to show this in action. I never realized to what extent the opening downward run in the bass generated the thematic transformations before. It leads to an all-important "repeated note" gesture (4 repeated notes, a little downward fillip, and an upward leap, followed by a chromatic descent of 2 notes), which in turn leads to an important lyrical idea, varied just enough in rhythm and tempo to disguise its parentage. At other points, Liszt breaks up the idea among widely disparate registers. "Repeated note" even gets a fugal treatment. Stuff like this happens throughout the sonata. To Argerich's immense credit, she never loses the thread or the listener.
However, not everyone listens for this kind of thing, and if the performance consisted of only this, a computer-generated account would suffice. Argerich brings even more, leaving aside the sheer physical excitement of her playing. Listening to the disc a number of times, I've discovered that she routinely builds incredibly long spans of music. She not only knows how to shade a phrase through sensitive, momentary builds and releases, she carries this method over longer spans. She knows precisely not only where the high point of a phrase or a section lies, but of an entire piece, even one this long. Other great pianists do this as well. In fact, this for me practically defines a great pianist. The buildup of volume comes more easily than the release, because it's a primary device of increasing tension and excitement, just as getting faster is. Unfortunately, a player might reach his peak before the music. This occasionally happened to Bernstein, particularly in Richard Strauss. He needed to get louder, but had already shot his dynamic wad, so to speak. The release is much harder: a player often just loses focus and the piece momentarily dies. Argerich always has someplace to go, up or down, and reaching the valley is just as urgent as attaining the summit. The rapid octaves leading to the long, "dying fall" of the coda demonstrate this clearly.
Magnificent.
Steve Schwartz
And to think, she was only nineteen when she recorded it,
Ed
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