Progetto Martha Argerich
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An Existential View of Music
The concept of festivals that take their names from great performing artists is becoming widespread for various reasons.
Although normal concert series planned by agencies and dedicated to an ever-more-restricted, consecrated repertoire
(which these series, in turn, re-consecrate) are still the basic format within which music?s great personalities reconfirm their worth,
this type of contact with the concert-going public does not completely satisfy either the questing spirit that these artists cherish or the
desire to create different, deeper relationships among themselves and with musicians who do not belong to the international concert circuit.
Success can never be the sole objective of a career: however legitimate the pursuit of it may be, to become a slave to that pursuit
would mean sacrificing creative energy on the altar of predictability.
There are various signs that demonstrate how high the level of dissatisfaction has become. More and more often, celebrated soloists
? especially pianists and violinists ? who have reached their maturity dedicate themselves entirely or in part to conducting.
Surely they take this path in order to avoid being trapped within a system that tends to limit action to the areas preordained by a
demand for music that feeds on itself.
In part, this demand and its concomitant exigencies of communication dictate the attitudes and poses that artists are called upon to
assume in order to carve a space for themselves on a stage crowded with fierce contenders, and these attitudes tend, in turn, to take
the place of a mask. The increasingly frequent consequence of all such factors is that some of these artists begin to feel a need to pause
for reflection, as a prelude to redirecting their careers or even to the option of withdrawing from the concert arena.
Fortunately for us, Martha Argerich has not yet reached that point, but she, like her art, draws nourishment from an unparalleled sincerity
of feeling. On the one hand, this means that she is sincere with herself in choosing the repertoire that she plays with personal conviction,
refusing to accept external impositions; on the other, it means that she calls herself into question with respect to that which is different
from the norm.
In addition to the generosity inherent in supporting those in need, her interest in young people is part and parcel of this story, as is her
more recently developed interest in performers of the older generation who embody the values of earlier days; these include Ruggero
Ricci and Ivry Gitlis, whom we had the good fortune of hearing together with her in Lugano last year. Witnesses to the new, to the
different, and witnesses to concepts that we cannot afford to consign to oblivion, given the importance of what they represent: these are
the manifestations of life?s continuum, of the law of time that conditions us.
Martha Argerich functions within this existential view of music, which seeks the immanence of truth rather than abstract perfection. Still
and always, she seeks those values and emotions in art that grasp the fundamental sense of becoming.
Carlo Piccardi
