When you talk to other pianists about Martha Argerich, a standard response is: we don’t know how she does it. And I was thinking much the same myself last week when she was at the Southbank, playing Prokofiev’s Concerto No 3 with the St Petersburg Philharmonic under Yuri Temirkanov.
Argerich is a capricious personality who cancels on a whim, so booking tickets for her concerts is a lottery – you never know whether she’ll turn up. But when she does, it’s an event. The RFH last week was packed, with long queues for returns. And nobody who made it through the doors could have been anything but dazzled by the strangely offhand genius of this woman in her seventies with battleship-grey hair but all guns blazing in her heart.
