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Classical

Prokofiev: Third Piano Concerto

Third Piano Concerto
Prokofiev: Third Piano Concerto
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Prokofiev’s great Third Piano Concerto has been Martha Argerich’s signature piece since she won competitions with it at the age of 16 in 1957. If you’re used to Bryon Janis’ reading on Mercury or have never heard Argerich play Prokofiev, you’re in for a shock. The only other artist I can think of who played the Third with this kind of energy at this breakneck tempo was Prokofiev himself, and Prokofiev’s performance is all speed and slop. Despite its power and pace, Argerich’s is far more agile, deeply thought out, and various— built upon the precise articulation of rhythmic and dynamic contrasts. Be they fortissississimo or pianissississimo, presto or adagio, every note, every chord, every bravura run and leaping flourish is sounded with passion and precision. It’s as if Argerich is uttering one long, complex, fully articulate sentence in one long thrilling breath. Abbado and the Berlin Phil keep up with her, though it often seems (as it often does with distinctive pianists in distinctive performances) as if Argerich is conducting as well as soloing. Full credit goes to DG’s engineers, whose close miking of the piano perfectly serves the clarity of line and muscular poetry of Argerich’s sensational reading. A must- own disc. 

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By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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