Any concert involving Martha Argerich is a special event. The promise of hearing the pianist doing what one suspects she enjoys most these days – playing chamber music with old friends – meant that the queue for returns spilled out on to the pavement. Here, that old friend was the cellist Mischa Maisky, with whom Argerich has been collaborating for almost half a century, and they were joined by the violinist Yossif Ivanov.
Maisky had only returned to the concert platform three weeks ago after serious illness and looked rather frail. There were moments when his playing seemed to lack assertiveness, too. Not so much in the Bach cello suite with which he opened the concert, the G major BWV1007, which a few moments of roughness apart, had an easy fluency, but in the two piano trios that he played with his colleagues, in which the cello line sometimes seemed to get submerged. Yet his shaping of solos in the slow movements of both Haydn’s G major “Gypsy Rondo” piano trio and Mendelssohn’s D minor Trio was certainly eloquent, and matched beautifully to Ivanov’s equally elegant violin. They were touching too in the piano-trio arrangement of Schubert’s song Du Bist die Ruh, which was added as an encore.
And then there was Argerich. Whether adding fizz to the outer movements of the Haydn or inexorably building up the momentum in the first movement of Mendelssohn after Maisky had launched it rather prosaically, she was irrepressible, and the downward scale with which she signed off that trio’s scherzo, every note perfectly articulated at dizzying speed, was almost worth the price of a ticket on its own.
And there was one special treat. While Argerich has become a reasonably regular visitor to London over the last decade or so as a concerto soloist, with occasional performances in chamber music or in music for two pianos, it is more than 30 years since she gave a solo recital in the capital. But to begin the second half of this concert she appeared alone on stage to launch into Bach’s C minor Partita, BWV826, introduced with almost theatrical grandeur in its opening Sinfonia, and the following movements played with scarcely a pause between them. Wonderfully supple and fleet, it was fabulously instinctive Bach playing – if not perhaps to the taste of baroque purists. Above all it was a reminder that, even at 83, Argerich can light up a concert in a way no other pianist can.
