There's something about her technique.. so relaxed and effortless. I remember seing her playing the first Prokofiev piano concerto and it looked like she played "for fun"
It’s interesting, you can see in videos that she has terrible stage fright and gets quite worked up before performances but on the stage - perfect technical and musical control (even if she’s a little bit of a speed demon, which I adore). You should watch Bloody Daughter by Stephaníe Argerich, it’s very interesting
Here's a recording of it - Orchestre de Paris in 1986 with Daniel Barenboim th-cam.com/video/oWGkem9qoe8/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=Facconti In line with the theme of this video, skip to 8:03.
Martha is the most excellent pianist on the planet today. Undoubtedly the best. A true Genius. Argentine pride 🇦🇷🎹🎶✨ So superlative in technique and expressiveness. So academically serious, sober and perfectly correct. Not like those unpresentable Lang... and Yung... whoever..., with their pathetic cringe-level disgusting performances 🤦🤮🤮🤮
Hello - The first movement of the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto is a good primer for repeated notes. After that the Scarlatti should come more readily. Sit with it. It comes naturally after a while.
I know this isn't what I should be taking away from this video but she and Meryl Streep look strikingly similar. Now all I want to see is a movie about Martha with Meryl Streep
I have actually - they are also both amazing. Most great pianists excel at all technical function of piano but there is something supernatural about argerich’s repeated note technique
This is disappointing. I feel certain a MIDI sequencer could be programmed to play it twenty or thirty times as fast. It's awful. Even a woodpecker could do much better. It certainly sounds like a woodpecker.
What is your point? Repeated notes are one of the most challenging technical elements of piano playing - one that is rare in the repertoire to this extent but one that argerich particularly excels at when called for. Not sure what else you could want….
@@ArgerichStan I could want her to consider what is best for the piece, not what shows off her crazy genetics. She's destroying the piece! Do you think the composer intended it to be played that fast? Do you think the piece was written to be used to demonstrate someone's crazy, amazing ability to use the repeating mechanism of a modern piano, which didn't exist when this was written, to repeat notes that fast? This piece, as I'm assuming you know, wasn't written for the piano. Repeated notes at this speed can't be done on a harpsichord. She's performing it on a different instrument with great disrespect in the way she's presenting it. Do you understand that she isn't supposed to be a circus performer or an acrobat? That she is meant to find the composer's conception and articulate it to us, not take a piece and pervert into a high-speed etude like this. When she plays MUSICALLY, she is a GOD. ABSOLUTELY! I am team Martha all the way. But she has a bizarre side where she takes a piece and obliterates the music in order to show how preternaturally fast she can move her wrists, or her arms, or her fingers. And it's completely silly. That's not music, that's some kind of circus act. She wants to do this? Do it in Liszt's Todtentanz, do it in a Mozkowski or a Czerny etude. I'm a musician and I love music. I studied with excellent teachers in NYC and in France. I've run into people all my life who can play things at extremely high speeds, and it's fun in a practice room or at someone's house after a concert. As a kid I could do it with some pieces - I could play the Chopin double thirds etude crazy fast for a kid. But as I matured, I understood we are there for the music, not to show off our fingers. This performance of Martha's is a fun thing at a party, to show off. But it's absurd as a musical performance of Scarlatti! Scarlatti didn't conceptualize it this way because it wasn't even physically possible to play it this fast when he wrote it. If the piece says, at the top, presumably in Italian, "to be played as fast as is physically possible" then I'm a fan of her performance. Otherwise, this is fun, but it's nonsense. By the way, I love your video. I love the fact that you've found this and put it up here for others and for me to enjoy and witness. And I'm now reacting to it. That's why there is a comment section. This is the worst side of Martha and I think she knows it. She has referred to the fact that she has a problem with excessive speed. My favorite Martha is the music she plays for the music itself. She wouldn't have the heart to destroy Bach like this, and she doesn't. She plays Bach with the respect and the artistry that it demands of her and she is glorious at it. The two things that come to mind are, I think it is, a Toccata in B flat, at least that's the key it was in on the recording I heard, but I didn't look at the label or the listing, I'm just guessing it was aToccata and I remember hearing that it was in B flat, and the other is some kind of Suite in C minor which starts out with an arpeggiated C minor chord followed by some thirds in the upper voice. My GOD that is musical. It's gorgeous, the conception is magnificent, the tone, the texture, everything, and in all the movements. She's definitely got it. But when she goes nuts like this and turns a piece into a physical trick, it's amusing, and, I guess, impressive to kids and students, but as an adult, I find it distressing and disrespectful of the composer. She knows better. I said this elsewhere - I had a friend who was from Brazil and his teacher was a close friend of Martha and they visited each other often and he was there many times with her. Martha was kind to him and one day she let him actually request things of her at a piano. Like can you do octave scales for me, can you play arpeggios in octaves in both hands in this or that key, can you do high speed scales in sixths, can you repeat a single note with one finger without moving your hand. He was like twelve, but very aware, and fairly advanced as a piano student. He told me all of that was mind blowing as were her trills, but the most astonishing thing she could do - in his mind - was double-thirds trills with the fingers of her left hand. He said her fingers blurred they were so fast. That the trills were clean and just impossibly amazing. She has some outrageous nervous system, flexibility, finger independence, anatomy, strength, endurance that let her do superhuman things at the piano. But those things aren't music and her role isn't to entertain people with her finger tricks using the works of great composers as her vanquished b****es. Those pieces are supposed to be the centerpiece. Why can't she write some etudes to demonstrate her crazy finger nonsense? Why obliterate poor Scarlatti? He shouldn't be her b***h, he should be her inspiration and her goal. I love her ability when she uses it in the service of music but when she goes mad like this I can't stand it. She isn't a child and she knows better. By the way, you said that "repeated notes are one of the most challenging technical elements of piano playing" and I don't agree, but I don't mean that harshly, just that as a pianist I don't think they're much of an issue because the modern piano does all the work for you. The catchment mechanism was built to do that very easily, that's what it's for. And I would also point out that repeated notes are a novelty, they don't show up all that often. When they do turn up, I never really noticed them as anything special unless it was in some kind of etude or one of only a few pieces. Calling it "one of the most challenging elements of piano playing", and I mean this inoffensively and gently, is an odd and very exaggerated-sounding thing to say, at least it seems that way to me. Again, I enjoyed this video and I hope you post more. Don't take my reaction as something against you.
@@joemiller95 what an odd long response. Your view is very narrow - of course there is room in music for virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake. Not everything has to be carefully considered and I would argue that her ability to still phrase within speed is unmatched by anyone Martha is not a historicist, nor should she be. If everyone played music with absolute respect of the conditions of the past, music would become very boring. Martha is very famous amongst pianists for her repeated note technique which has been studied on video as it has been slowed down and analyzed to show that her finger rotations are different than how most pianists approach them. I don’t know who you are but I can almost guarantee I am a better pianist than you as I have three degrees from Juilliard. The modern piano does not do all the work for you - especially when attempting them at the speed she does. Scarbo is not considered the hardest work in the repertoire for nothing
@@ArgerichStan How absurd to argue like this. To call someone who approaches music from the perspective of articulating the composer's intention a historicist, as if being the spokesperson for the composer is some kind of optional mode, is strange and silly. And it does help explain the horrific direction this is all going in given the modern competition creatures who blast through pieces like they're cutting underbrush with chainsaws. Scarbo is hard for people for whom it is hard. I don't think any piece is the most difficult for everyone. Scarbo has repeated notes. That doesn't make it "the hardest piece in the repertoire". I knew two different people who handled the technical aspects of it quite easily. I never liked it all that much, but I get that it's something of substance worth enjoying if it speaks to someone. And arguing about which of us is more decorated and qualified is a strange direction for you to propose. You thought getting degrees from one school with a limited faculty was the better way, and I thought going to teachers directly was the better way. I lived in Europe for many years and studied with the best piano, composition, and conducting teachers available. I went to Julliard one time when I was in NYC, auditioned for the conducting program, was given the option to go there, and after reflection, decided it wasn't for me. I was already working as an assistant conductor and opera coach by then. I got a head start at all of this so I decided to go to college instead of getting degrees I didn't think I could put to any beneficial use. I went to Harvard like my parents, does that matter? It was so long ago. It was part of my childhood at this point. Why do you think it's important to make this about you or me? I certainly don't. I'll be blunt - I have actually seen grown men go into an alley to compare penis sizes during a night of drunkenness - I and the others stayed outside, but your comments about your degrees remind me of that moment. Should I list the people I've studied with, the jobs I've had, the scope of my involvement? Because surely you would agree that degrees are just a beginning, not the proper way to evaluate people's level of knowledge and expertise as professionals, no? But I'm not going to do that. It doesn't appeal to me to get to that level, there's enough of that kind of thing online. I've watched it from the side and it amuses me more than it feels like something I want to do. I lost my fascination with piano virtuosity by the time I was twenty. I went to Europe as a kid to study composition and they put me through all the solfege. I met other students who were hearing so much more than I had yet realized it was possible to hear that I started being more impressed by that than the way someone could wiggle their fingers. Earlier in my life I was as impressed by this kind of circus act as everyone else seems to be, but I outgrew it. That's all. I don't see any value in it for its own sake. I work with orchestras and singers now, some chamber music, but finger wiggling isn't something I can get much out of, especially when it involves an obviously blatant disregard for the intentions of the composer, though this goes so far beyond that it's clear that the piece was selected just because it can be used as a way of demonstrating her fingers, like someone choosing a bunch of pylons, setting them up, and taking a new vehicle out to cut doughnuts and burn rubber. I assume this is something she was introduced to by Michelangeli, but he didn't play it like he was juggling coins, he actually brought something of value to life. To me it's a shame that the music itself has less and less meaning to modern audiences than it once did. I don't want to fight with you, it has no point. I expressed an opinion; you might consider that it's ok for people to have very different opinions about this sort of thing. Or maybe you don't agree and think that disagreement is something that needs to be actively combatted. If so, that's something we disagree about as well. Anyway, we're more alike than we are different in what we find interesting, compared to the general population.
There's something about her technique.. so relaxed and effortless. I remember seing her playing the first Prokofiev piano concerto and it looked like she played "for fun"
It’s interesting, you can see in videos that she has terrible stage fright and gets quite worked up before performances but on the stage - perfect technical and musical control (even if she’s a little bit of a speed demon, which I adore). You should watch Bloody Daughter by Stephaníe Argerich, it’s very interesting
Martha is a Reigning Queen of piano, repeated or any other kind of notes.❤❤❤
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
What about Sue Keller?
She’s a genius!!! Out of this world
NOT THE MOMMY 💀
My teacher said that her repeated notes are "crystal clear like a machine gun".
The metaphor was so right and accurate, it never left my mind.
Long live the Queen!
Ah, I'd often wondered if she'd ever performed Liszt's Totentanz. Love that piece.
th-cam.com/video/oWGkem9qoe8/w-d-xo.html
She has! It was at a concert in 1986 in Paris! It’s amazing!
Es la última que muestran
Here's a recording of it - Orchestre de Paris in 1986 with Daniel Barenboim
th-cam.com/video/oWGkem9qoe8/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=Facconti
In line with the theme of this video, skip to 8:03.
For shure she is a queen! from Montréal, Canada.
She’s the best!
I love her
Slay Queen! Love her!
yaaaas! u spittin
Hace q lo técnico y prodijioso se diluya en apasionante y entretenido... increible
Martha is the most excellent pianist on the planet today. Undoubtedly the best. A true Genius.
Argentine pride 🇦🇷🎹🎶✨
So superlative in technique and expressiveness. So academically serious, sober and perfectly correct.
Not like those unpresentable Lang... and Yung... whoever..., with their pathetic cringe-level disgusting performances 🤦🤮🤮🤮
It sounds like a different instrument
Hello - The first movement of the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto is a good primer for repeated notes. After that the Scarlatti should come more readily. Sit with it. It comes naturally after a while.
Wow!
Q bestia q es Marta no tiene adjetivo
My mother
It looks like if she's writing an email on her laptop 🙂
😅 my mail
I know this isn't what I should be taking away from this video but she and Meryl Streep look strikingly similar. Now all I want to see is a movie about Martha with Meryl Streep
MOTHER.
crystal clear technique.
Good contribute!
Wow……. Thank you!!
mommy
Mother!
Yet she hates trills
Hates them but she’s amazing at them too!
@@ArgerichStan I know, crazy, life's not fair
Why do you say that? 🤔
@@luisfelipe8662 she said it
@@chester6343 I didn't know it. Thanks!
martha go brrrrrrrrrrrrr
Viva Perón
"When asian mom play the piano":
Love the last picture in the video that she stares back at Liszt, and you can see she's winning.
Compared to Valentina Lisitsa, Martha is just a little princess, not Queen
I am a huge Lisitsa fan, she got me into classical music to begin with. But even I know that it's exactly the other way around
@@jameshakai1662 Tastes differ, no proof
@@jameshakai1662 Totally the opposite 😂
If you believe she's the queen of repeated notes you haven't heard Thibaudet or Grosvenor.
they said Queen, QUEEN.
I have actually - they are also both amazing. Most great pianists excel at all technical function of piano but there is something supernatural about argerich’s repeated note technique
This is disappointing. I feel certain a MIDI sequencer could be programmed to play it twenty or thirty times as fast.
It's awful. Even a woodpecker could do much better. It certainly sounds like a woodpecker.
What is your point? Repeated notes are one of the most challenging technical elements of piano playing - one that is rare in the repertoire to this extent but one that argerich particularly excels at when called for. Not sure what else you could want….
@@ArgerichStan don't feed the trolls. It's probably just a bored 12-yo kid
@@ArgerichStan I could want her to consider what is best for the piece, not what shows off her crazy genetics.
She's destroying the piece! Do you think the composer intended it to be played that fast? Do you think the piece was written to be used to demonstrate someone's crazy, amazing ability to use the repeating mechanism of a modern piano, which didn't exist when this was written, to repeat notes that fast? This piece, as I'm assuming you know, wasn't written for the piano. Repeated notes at this speed can't be done on a harpsichord. She's performing it on a different instrument with great disrespect in the way she's presenting it.
Do you understand that she isn't supposed to be a circus performer or an acrobat? That she is meant to find the composer's conception and articulate it to us, not take a piece and pervert into a high-speed etude like this.
When she plays MUSICALLY, she is a GOD. ABSOLUTELY! I am team Martha all the way.
But she has a bizarre side where she takes a piece and obliterates the music in order to show how preternaturally fast she can move her wrists, or her arms, or her fingers. And it's completely silly. That's not music, that's some kind of circus act.
She wants to do this? Do it in Liszt's Todtentanz, do it in a Mozkowski or a Czerny etude.
I'm a musician and I love music. I studied with excellent teachers in NYC and in France. I've run into people all my life who can play things at extremely high speeds, and it's fun in a practice room or at someone's house after a concert. As a kid I could do it with some pieces - I could play the Chopin double thirds etude crazy fast for a kid. But as I matured, I understood we are there for the music, not to show off our fingers. This performance of Martha's is a fun thing at a party, to show off. But it's absurd as a musical performance of Scarlatti! Scarlatti didn't conceptualize it this way because it wasn't even physically possible to play it this fast when he wrote it.
If the piece says, at the top, presumably in Italian, "to be played as fast as is physically possible" then I'm a fan of her performance. Otherwise, this is fun, but it's nonsense.
By the way, I love your video. I love the fact that you've found this and put it up here for others and for me to enjoy and witness. And I'm now reacting to it. That's why there is a comment section.
This is the worst side of Martha and I think she knows it. She has referred to the fact that she has a problem with excessive speed.
My favorite Martha is the music she plays for the music itself. She wouldn't have the heart to destroy Bach like this, and she doesn't. She plays Bach with the respect and the artistry that it demands of her and she is glorious at it. The two things that come to mind are, I think it is, a Toccata in B flat, at least that's the key it was in on the recording I heard, but I didn't look at the label or the listing, I'm just guessing it was aToccata and I remember hearing that it was in B flat, and the other is some kind of Suite in C minor which starts out with an arpeggiated C minor chord followed by some thirds in the upper voice. My GOD that is musical. It's gorgeous, the conception is magnificent, the tone, the texture, everything, and in all the movements. She's definitely got it. But when she goes nuts like this and turns a piece into a physical trick, it's amusing, and, I guess, impressive to kids and students, but as an adult, I find it distressing and disrespectful of the composer. She knows better.
I said this elsewhere - I had a friend who was from Brazil and his teacher was a close friend of Martha and they visited each other often and he was there many times with her. Martha was kind to him and one day she let him actually request things of her at a piano. Like can you do octave scales for me, can you play arpeggios in octaves in both hands in this or that key, can you do high speed scales in sixths, can you repeat a single note with one finger without moving your hand. He was like twelve, but very aware, and fairly advanced as a piano student. He told me all of that was mind blowing as were her trills, but the most astonishing thing she could do - in his mind - was double-thirds trills with the fingers of her left hand. He said her fingers blurred they were so fast. That the trills were clean and just impossibly amazing. She has some outrageous nervous system, flexibility, finger independence, anatomy, strength, endurance that let her do superhuman things at the piano. But those things aren't music and her role isn't to entertain people with her finger tricks using the works of great composers as her vanquished b****es. Those pieces are supposed to be the centerpiece. Why can't she write some etudes to demonstrate her crazy finger nonsense? Why obliterate poor Scarlatti? He shouldn't be her b***h, he should be her inspiration and her goal. I love her ability when she uses it in the service of music but when she goes mad like this I can't stand it. She isn't a child and she knows better.
By the way, you said that "repeated notes are one of the most challenging technical elements of piano playing" and I don't agree, but I don't mean that harshly, just that as a pianist I don't think they're much of an issue because the modern piano does all the work for you. The catchment mechanism was built to do that very easily, that's what it's for. And I would also point out that repeated notes are a novelty, they don't show up all that often. When they do turn up, I never really noticed them as anything special unless it was in some kind of etude or one of only a few pieces. Calling it "one of the most challenging elements of piano playing", and I mean this inoffensively and gently, is an odd and very exaggerated-sounding thing to say, at least it seems that way to me.
Again, I enjoyed this video and I hope you post more. Don't take my reaction as something against you.
@@joemiller95 what an odd long response. Your view is very narrow - of course there is room in music for virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake. Not everything has to be carefully considered and I would argue that her ability to still phrase within speed is unmatched by anyone Martha is not a historicist, nor should she be. If everyone played music with absolute respect of the conditions of the past, music would become very boring. Martha is very famous amongst pianists for her repeated note technique which has been studied on video as it has been slowed down and analyzed to show that her finger rotations are different than how most pianists approach them. I don’t know who you are but I can almost guarantee I am a better pianist than you as I have three degrees from Juilliard. The modern piano does not do all the work for you - especially when attempting them at the speed she does. Scarbo is not considered the hardest work in the repertoire for nothing
@@ArgerichStan How absurd to argue like this. To call someone who approaches music from the perspective of articulating the composer's intention a historicist, as if being the spokesperson for the composer is some kind of optional mode, is strange and silly. And it does help explain the horrific direction this is all going in given the modern competition creatures who blast through pieces like they're cutting underbrush with chainsaws.
Scarbo is hard for people for whom it is hard. I don't think any piece is the most difficult for everyone. Scarbo has repeated notes. That doesn't make it "the hardest piece in the repertoire". I knew two different people who handled the technical aspects of it quite easily. I never liked it all that much, but I get that it's something of substance worth enjoying if it speaks to someone.
And arguing about which of us is more decorated and qualified is a strange direction for you to propose. You thought getting degrees from one school with a limited faculty was the better way, and I thought going to teachers directly was the better way. I lived in Europe for many years and studied with the best piano, composition, and conducting teachers available. I went to Julliard one time when I was in NYC, auditioned for the conducting program, was given the option to go there, and after reflection, decided it wasn't for me. I was already working as an assistant conductor and opera coach by then. I got a head start at all of this so I decided to go to college instead of getting degrees I didn't think I could put to any beneficial use. I went to Harvard like my parents, does that matter? It was so long ago. It was part of my childhood at this point.
Why do you think it's important to make this about you or me? I certainly don't.
I'll be blunt - I have actually seen grown men go into an alley to compare penis sizes during a night of drunkenness - I and the others stayed outside, but your comments about your degrees remind me of that moment. Should I list the people I've studied with, the jobs I've had, the scope of my involvement? Because surely you would agree that degrees are just a beginning, not the proper way to evaluate people's level of knowledge and expertise as professionals, no? But I'm not going to do that. It doesn't appeal to me to get to that level, there's enough of that kind of thing online. I've watched it from the side and it amuses me more than it feels like something I want to do.
I lost my fascination with piano virtuosity by the time I was twenty. I went to Europe as a kid to study composition and they put me through all the solfege. I met other students who were hearing so much more than I had yet realized it was possible to hear that I started being more impressed by that than the way someone could wiggle their fingers. Earlier in my life I was as impressed by this kind of circus act as everyone else seems to be, but I outgrew it. That's all. I don't see any value in it for its own sake. I work with orchestras and singers now, some chamber music, but finger wiggling isn't something I can get much out of, especially when it involves an obviously blatant disregard for the intentions of the composer, though this goes so far beyond that it's clear that the piece was selected just because it can be used as a way of demonstrating her fingers, like someone choosing a bunch of pylons, setting them up, and taking a new vehicle out to cut doughnuts and burn rubber. I assume this is something she was introduced to by Michelangeli, but he didn't play it like he was juggling coins, he actually brought something of value to life.
To me it's a shame that the music itself has less and less meaning to modern audiences than it once did.
I don't want to fight with you, it has no point. I expressed an opinion; you might consider that it's ok for people to have very different opinions about this sort of thing. Or maybe you don't agree and think that disagreement is something that needs to be actively combatted.
If so, that's something we disagree about as well.
Anyway, we're more alike than we are different in what we find interesting, compared to the general population.
Scarlatti very fast. Why. This virtuoso trchnique kill the logic and baroque atmosphere of this musik.