★★★☆☆
The last time Martha Argerich played at the Wigmore Hall it was to celebrate her ex-husband Stephen Kovacevich’s 75th birthday. Then, her fellow Argentine pianist Alberto Portugheis turned the pages, but now he has turned 75 (as has Argerich) so the two shared the stage. The suave-looking page-turners who turned up this time looked ready to hit the keys themselves; perhaps this was a tryout for them too.
Strange things like this happen in Martha-land. Last week Argerich was accepting a Kennedy Center Honor in the White House from President Obama. And here she was, at the Wigmore, distractedly swatting away the applause and taking her seat in Portugheis’s shadow for the first duet, Mozart’s Sonata in D, K448, with her piano tucked behind his.
The affection between the compatriots was better expressed in the way the pair behaved between the pieces — despite being almost exact contemporaries, Argerich fussed around Portugheis like a mother hen — than in their musical rapport. Both two-piano works, the Mozart in the first half and Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn in the second, suffered from lapses in co-ordination, although the Brahms had an appealing muscularity. The Mozart was hair-raising (not in a good way) and given a slightly sour edge by Portugheis’s metallic tone at the top end of the keyboard.
There were fine moments. Seated at one piano for Rachmaninov’s Op 11 Six Pieces, with Argerich at the lower, or “secondo” position, and Portugheis in the “primo” slot, the two dug deeper and found some theatricality in these early vignettes, although the chemistry was still unstable.
Switching positions in the second half for the four-hands version of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, Argerich cast her magic on the rippling figurations of the French composer’s stroll in fairyland. Her ethereal broken chords in Beauty and the Beast were the highlight of the concert. The evening only really relaxed, however, when the pair delivered moody and ebullient encores by Piazzolla and Milhaud respectively.