Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

that decisive moment

Martha Memories: The Week’s 8 Best Classical Music Moments on YouTube

Image
Martha Argerich playing at Lincoln Center in 2007.Credit...Richard Termine for The New York Times

Our critics and reporters offer a glimpse of what’s moved and delighted them on YouTube. Read the rest of our classical music coverage here.


AT 6 MINUTES 47 SECONDS

This week we asked eight young pianists, including Daniil Trifonov, Khatia Buniatishvili and Benjamin Grosvenor, to share their favorite recordings by the great Martha Argerich, in honor of her appearance with Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia at Carnegie Hall. Although I’ve obsessed over her debut recital and her breathtaking concertos with Claudio Abbado, I often find myself returning to her cycle of Beethoven violin sonatas recorded with Gidon Kremer in the 1990s. Few pieces showcase Ms. Argerich’s playing as brazenly as the passionate “Kreutzer” Sonata. She has the might of a full orchestra, and preternatural clarity despite the volatility of Beethoven’s score. But this recording also showcases the magic of Ms. Argerich’s chamber music style: Somehow she sounds both proudly independent and totally in sync with Mr. Kremer. Very often their performance feels like it’s on the verge of derailment, but they maintain control over the chaos. JOSHUA BARONE

AT 29 MINUTES 50 SECONDS

Riccardo Chailly conducts the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra with barely contained glee in this film, at least when he’s not desperately trying to keep up with the soloist — and well he might. This is the visual accompaniment to one of the most famous piano recordings of them all, Rachmaninoff’s Third with Ms. Argerich. Awesome in the genuine sense of the word, to call it intense does not even begin to describe it. The power, the pace, the panache are simply astonishing, not to mention the sheer concentration visible on Ms. Argerich’s face as she dares to pull it all off. Isolate just one sliver of the brilliance: the endless subtlety of her rubato, slyly shaping an innocuous part of the finale into a moment of deepest wonder. DAVID ALLEN


AT 2 MINUTES 16 SECONDS

In Ms. Argerich’s towering early traversal of Chopin’s Sonata No. 3, the Largo stands out, beginning stonily then receding into almost dissolving dreaminess, and on from there in great tidal waves of approach and release. It’s hard not to speak in reverential paradoxes about her playing: As she gets to the movement’s great, gentle central melody, it’s as if she’s wandered into it — and yet it would be crazy to say that there’s not intention behind every note. The bass notes have an almost guitar-like thrum, percussive and liquid at once. She doesn’t overstate, yet the effect is epic; the phrases, the underlying breaths, last longer than you’d thought possible. ZACHARY WOOLFE


AT 10 MINUTES 19 SECONDS

The Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has had a busy week. He performed Rachmaninoff’s rarely programmed Piano Concerto No. 4 with the New York Philharmonic, where he is the orchestra’s artist in residence this season, and joined us for a Facebook Live concert and interview about his new Sibelius album. He also appeared at the Greene Space at WQXR downtown to play works by Sibelius and Schubert, as well as Jörg Widmann’s delightful 2009 piano solo “Idyll and Abyss: Six Schubert Reminiscences.” The piece is a postmodern remix that blends Schubert’s yearning melodies with tone clusters and playful gestures — even whistling. Still, the music has its share of heartfelt moments. Look to the closing movement, “Taurig, desolat” (“Mournful, desolate”), which despite its somewhat mocking title nods to Schubert’s profoundly beautiful Sonata in B flat (D. 960). JOSHUA BARONE

Read our review of Mr. Andsnes’s concert with the Philharmonic.


at 10 minutes 13 seconds

During a captivating overview of Steve Reich’s music performed by Ensemble Signal at the Library of Congress this week — the program will arrive in New York on Nov. 2 — I found myself slightly disappointed by the uniformity of timbre among the composer’s recent works. The omnipresence of vibraphones, strings and high winds became tinnily enervating over two hours, and I longed for the throaty bass clarinet that grounds Reich’s classic “Music for 18 Musicians.” And I wondered if the spiritual successor to Reich’s early Minimalist experiments might in fact be the composer Michael Gordon. Mr. Gordon’s recent large-scale works fixate on a limited sonic palette — a cohort of bassoons, a smattering of wooden 2-by-4s, the innards of a piano — but somehow unlock a vast range of tonal hues. His 2012 “Rushes,” written for seven bassoons, manages to achieve a grandiosity of colors from such restricted means. WILLIAM ROBIN


AT 18 minutes 52 seconds

Andras Schiff has been performing both as pianist and conductor with the New York Philharmonic this week, in a program including concertos by Bach and Schumann and orchestral works by Haydn and Bartok. Mr. Schiff may be best known as an incomparable Bach player. In 2012, a highlight of his Bach Project, when he played the composer’s major works on tour (and from memory), was his probing, vibrant and beautiful traversal of both books of the Well-Tempered Klavier at the 92nd Street Y. For me, he is also the go-to pianist for Bartok. Here’s a splendid performance of the Concerto No. 3, from a London Proms concert in 2011 with the Hallé Orchestra, in which Mr. Schiff reveals the folkloric lyricism coursing through this crunchy piece. And listen to a fleeting fugal episode in the third movement, when his skills as a pristine Bach player come in handy. ANTHONY TOMMASINI


AT 5 seconds

It’s a great beginning, in more ways than one. The pulse-quickening toccata that opens Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” is essentially the overture of the earliest opera still widely performed. After opening with a brass fanfare fit for a duke, the tune passes to a thrumming string section that still inspires thoughts of dancing after more than four centuries, and then everybody plays. John Eliot Gardiner is conducting Monteverdi’s surviving operas around the world this year to mark the 450th anniversary of the composer’s birth — one of opera’s oldest anniversaries. This earlier performance from the Teatro La Fenice in Venice shows why some of opera’s earliest notes still sound fresh. Quite a curtain-raiser. MICHAEL COOPER

Read our interview with John Eliot Gardiner.


at 30 seconds

The recent death of the great American poet Richard Wilbur had me thinking again about the wonderful lyrics he wrote for Bernstein’s operetta “Candide.” His skills as a sometime lyricist have been hailed by no less an expert than Stephen Sondheim. Of course, through various revised versions other the years, others (including Sondheim) made contributions to Wilbur’s work, though he remains credited as the primary lyricist. Here’s Bernstein conducting Jerry Hadley and June Anderson in “Oh, Happy We” from a concert performance in London in late 1989. (Subtitles help you savor the words.) Every moment is wonderful; it’s poignant to catch a couple of glimpses of Bernstein looking pleased. Less than a year later he died at 72. ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT