“There is a sound, a special variety of collective whooping, that rises up from a large audience at the sight of an artist it admires deeply in its bones,” writes Jeremy Eichler in Wednesday’s (10/25) Boston Globe. “On Sunday night, as the 76-year-old Argentine pianist Martha Argerich took the stage of Boston’s Symphony Hall after an absence of nearly three decades, the packed audience, as if by pre-arrangement, knew what to do. It conferred that sound…. Argerich … came to Boston with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia of Rome and its music director, Antonio Pappano…. She showed up with Prokofiev’s youthfully clamorous and knuckle-busting Third Piano Concerto…. Her technique remains an astonishing marvel of penetration and economy…. The evening … closed with rousing accounts of two works by Respighi: ‘Fountains of Rome’ and ‘The Pines of Rome.’ … This was the orchestra that gave the world premieres of both Respighi works, and I can’t recall ever hearing them played more idiomatically…. Sibelius’s ‘Valse Triste’ followed as an encore, and it contained one of loveliest pianissimos heard this season.” Argerich will be honored at the Kennedy Center Honors on December 4, to be televised on CBS later that month.
Posted October 26, 2017
