Martha's Mozart

Among the great unanswered questions of life is why the great Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich (b. 1941) never recorded the Brahms Piano Concertos.  Leaving that aside, it's noticeable that she didn't record much Mozart either.  She recorded a couple of concertos for Deutsche Grammophon  in 2014, with Claudio Abbado not long before his death. (Abbado had earlier recorded Mozart concertos with Serkin and Pires, also on DG.)  Two decades earlier, though, Argerich had recorded two solo concertos for the Teldec label  -- No. 19 (K.459) and No. 20 (K.466) -- along with No.10, for two pianos (K.365).  On this recording, the sound is excellent, with plenty of presence for both orchestra and solo instrument.  The orchestra in the solo concertos is the Orchestre di Padova e del Veneto, and the pianist/composer Alexandre Rabinovitch conducts.  Rabinovitch takes the first piano in K.365, with Jorg Faerber conducting the Wurrtemberg Chamber Orchestra.  The two-piano concerto has plenty of energy and charm, but the solo concertos are the main attractions here.  These are spontaneous-sounding, muscular performances, with the left-hand writing given more weight than one usually hears, but there's nothing ponderous or scrappy about the overall effect.  Argerich's playing of the Beethoven cadenza in the first movement of K.466 is alone almost worth the price of the disc, and the probing, almost improvisatory opening of the second movement is engaging and arresting.  Throughout, the sense of interplay between orchestra and soloist is strong.  K. 466 is a turbulent and brooding piece -- reportedly, one of Beethoven's favorites -- and it gets a great performance here, from both pianist and orchestra.  You want to stand up and cheer at the end.