Martha Argerich review – our greatest living pianist? It’s hard to disagree

Hard to believe, but on 5 June Martha Argerich turned 80. Her birthday has been celebrated by several of the labels for which she has recorded over seven decades, with lavish reissues of her classic discs, many of them dazzling performances that rank among the greatest of the piano repertoire ever recorded. Even though it’s well over 30 years since she was lured into a studio to make a solo recording, and almost as long since she gave a solo recital in public, saying that she feels “lonely” on stage without a recital partner or an orchestra, she is still generally regarded as the greatest pianist alive today.

EuroArts’ collection superbly complements what is available on the audio discs. It not only includes some of Argerich’s most celebrated interpretations, but begins with Bloody Daughter, the affectionate 2012 documentary that her youngest daughter, Stéphanie, made about the notoriously publicity-shy pianist. The concert performances range from the 1970s to just last year. There’s a pair of piano concertos recorded with British orchestras in 1977 – a fierce, imposing account of Tchaikovsky’s First with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Charles Groves, and a typically breathtaking one of Prokofiev’s Third, with André Previn and the London Symphony – as well as a 2010 performance in Warsaw of Chopin’s First Concerto, the work with which she had won the Chopin Competition in the same city 45 years earlier, and which also includes a precious couple of solo encores, a Chopin mazurka and one of Schumann’s Op 12 Fantasiestücke.

No portrait of Argerich would be complete without an example of her chamber playing, collaborations that have dominated her musical life for the last quarter century. Here it’s a recital of violin sonatas by Schumann, Prokofiev and Franck with Guy Braunstein, ending with a delicious group of Kreisler lollipops, recorded in February last year. But perhaps the most compelling discs are those with two of her most enduring collaborators, Daniel Barenboim and Claudio Abbado. Argerich’s two-piano recital with Barenboim in the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 2014 – a programme of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – was clearly an emotional return to the city in which the two great musicians had grown up in the 1940s. And though the filming of Abbado’s Prometheus-themed concert with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1992, which begins with Beethoven’s The Creatures of Prometheus and ends with a section of Luigi Nono’s “tragedy for listening” Prometeo, is just a bit too “arty”, it has Scriabin’s Prometheus as its glorious centrepiece, a work whose darting, flickering solo-piano part is so perfectly suited to Argerich’s imperishable virtuosity.