Peral Music For the thinking ear

From Buenos Aires to Berlin

For classical musicians in 1940s Buenos Aires, all roads sooner or later led to No. 1257 Talcahuano. To this house, located in a fashionable residential quarter of the Argentinian capital just north of the city centre, came celebrated international visitors such as Adolf Busch and Arthur Rubinstein, along with local soloists and music students. There, at the home of Ernesto Rosenthal, a Viennese Jewish refugee businessman and amateur violinist, Friday night was chamber music night.

Musicians of all ages attended. Even some very young ones came too, attracted by Mrs. Rosenthal’s homemade apfelstrudel as well as by the music. So it was, in 1949, that Aida Barenboim brought her seven-year-old son Danielito along to a Rosenthal evening for the first time. So it was also that Juanita Argerich similarly brought her eight-year-old daughter Marthita to the Rosenthals. “We sight-read and played with whomever was in town,” Daniel Barenboim remembers. “We were the two little wunderkinder,” recalls Martha Argerich. “We played children’s games under the table,” says Barenboim. “I used to hide, but he would find me,” Argerich laughs.

Astonishingly, in view of what these two child talents were later to become in the keyboard world, the two great Buenos Aires-born pianists do not seem to have ever played at the piano together at those now distant Rosenthal chamber music evenings. Even so, more than 60 years later, Daniel Barenboim remembers listening to his eight-year-old friend playing Chopin’s C sharp minor Étude from op. 10 “with exactly the same fire and brilliance that she plays it with today”. Martha Argerich just remembers that “Daniel played everything. His enormous repertoire was already amazing. My mother used to say, ‘Oh, why can’t you be like Daniel?’”

In due course the two budding virtuosos left Buenos Aires to conquer the wider musical world. Barenboim was the first to leave Argentina, in 1952. Argerich did not follow until 1955. Their careers took separate but equally stellar paths. From a distance, they watched one another as they became among the most revered musicians of their era. Occasionally their paths would cross, at masterclasses in Salzburg, for example, and especially in London in the 1960s. But it was not until the 1980s, when Barenboim was music director of the Orchestre de Paris, that Argerich did a series of dates with her fellow porteño. Argerich played Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto under Barenboim’s direction, and he persuaded her to learn Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain. It was also in Paris, during roughly the same period, that Barenboim and Argerich finally gave a four-handed recital together for the first time, in a programme that included works by Schubert and Liszt.

But then their paths diverged again. Each had their own separate musical projects. Argerich had a period of illness. Barenboim was preoccupied with his conducting. And then, in 2013, Barenboim suggested another reunion, this time in Berlin, as part of the 2014 Festtage – the spring festival that Barenboim has organised in the German capital city every year since 1996. He proposed a programme of music for four hands, some of it played on two pianos, some at one piano. Argerich thought about it and accepted. The result was one of the most nervously anticipated recitals of modern times, as the two legendary pianists reunited in Berlin’s Philharmonie on the afternoon of Saturday 19 April 2014. Argerich arrived in Berlin a week before the recital, and rehearsals took place most days in the run-up to the performance.

The programme was the result of friendly negotiations between the two pianists. “We always speak in Spanish – well, Argentinian!” says Barenboim. Mozart was an obvious choice. “I am completely crazy about Daniel’s Mozart playing,” says Argerich. “He is like a singer in every phrase, but for me Mozart is difficult and I was nervous about it.” Argerich had played the D major Sonata for Two Pianos before, but when Barenboim suggested that the sonata should be played with a very controlled dynamic, it suddenly sounded right. The two pianists played the Mozart side by side, Barenboim’s piano closer to the front of the platform and Argerich’s at the back. Schubert’s Variations on an Original Theme in A flat major had been part of the Barenboim–Argerich programme all those years before in Paris. Now, with one piano wheeled temporarily to the wings, the two sat side by side at the one instrument. Argerich chose to play the bottom part. “She is a wonderful accompanist,” says Barenboim, “and I think she also wanted to control the pedals and the balance.”

But it was the second part of the programme that clinched the deal for the Barenboim and Argerich reunion and that most of the audience had probably come to hear. Prior to the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky had himself prepared a four-hand piano arrangement of the orchestral score – and even gave an early private performance of it with his friend Claude Debussy – but Argerich had never played it before. She learnt the score specially for the Berlin recital. “I didn’t feel inhibited by the difficulties, though it certainly is difficult, rhythmically in particular,” she says. “But I think it worked. We were very happy with it.”

The audience reception for their brilliant and blistering playing was wildly enthusiastic. And it was shared by Argerich’s platform partner. “I have been conducting this piece for many years,” says Barenboim. “It is a very slippery affair. In an orchestral performance, someone in the orchestra is always insecure at some point, with an imperfect tone or rhythm. Someone always makes an error. But this was the first time Martha had played it. And she made absolutely no mistakes at all. I was flabbergasted.” Sitting in the hall, one was bound to agree. It was as though the long artistic journeys that began in those musical soirées in Buenos Aires back in 1949 had finally reached a long-deferred but somehow always predestined meeting-point.

Martin Kettle