Prokofiev’s third piano concerto has been an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember being a pianist. I remember seeing the video of Lang Lang messing around with the third movement, back in the early days of YouTube:
I began to study Prokofiev 3rd when I was 14 or 15, and quickly became obsessed with Martha Argerich’s performances of the piece. Some of her recordings were objectively fantastic: LSO, Previn, 1977. Equally stunning, but funny: [BBC Proms, Dutoit], where she enters the coda of the 3rd movement noticeably faster than the orchestra (27:41), and one must wonder whether it was an aesthetic choice, showboating, or a prank on Dutoit, her ex-husband. In any case, it’s “wrong”, and it’s effective.
I’d met Argerich at a piano competition in 2013. I remember flubbing the opening octaves of Liszt’s Rigoletto Paraphrase in the final round and feeling absolutely mortified that I’d embarrassed myself in front of an idol. Evidently she liked the rest of the playing enough to give me third—and I promptly flubbed the octaves again in the prizewinner’s concert.
I’d heard Argerich play in 2013, but only in a collaborative program with Sergei Babayan—I think the Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances? But it wasn’t Prokofiev 3rd. So when I saw she was coming to Boston, performing Prokofiev 3rd, I knew I had to go. I was used to paying $15 for BSO student tickets at the time, but I paid $131 for the best tickets I could get, smack in the middle of Symphony Hall.
Argerich was 76 by this point, but her ferocity had not at all diminished. I don’t remember exactly what the playing sounded like, but I remember how it felt: lightning in the brilliant opening of the 1st movement and the ascending scale-like passages, pure snark with the perfect amount of ugliness in the sarcastic B theme of that movement, ethereal floating in the 4th variation of the 2nd movement, a ferocious attack in the third movement’s coda. Argerich’s age didn’t show at all—if anything, it made her lean into some of the more extreme mannerisms in her playing. It was a dream come true to hear her, and another to catch her after the concert.
The Respighi was good too.