In one form or another, the act of improvisation of simultaneously composing and performing on the hoof has a history as long as that of music itself. From the improvised vocal polyphony, called discantus, of medieval times to the extravagant exhibitions of Chopin and Liszt in the salons of 19th-century Paris, artists have happily made it up on the spot. It’s an ability on which jazz musicians depend, but it’s rare for a classical artist to make improvisation a cornerstone of a career. That’s what the Vene-zuelan pianist Gabriela Montero has done. Her recitals nowadays are half repertoire pieces, half improvisation. It is both what is expected and what she prefers.
Her record company, EMI, has taken her enthusiastically under its wing. A second disc of improvisations, Baroque, is released on February 18, two days after her free late-afternoon appearance in the Clore Ballroom, at the Festival Hall. She also has a website project that entails her taking ideas from visitors to the site, improvising on them, live, then making the result available for free down-load for three days. The marketing putsch is certainly full-on, a cynical observer might assume.
Yet, within seconds of meeting Montero (in the shop window of a piano dealer near Marble Arch, as it happens), it is clear that she is for real. She is open, warm, humble, friendly, even vulnerable, and clearly a social animal (that is why she enjoys the exchanges on her website so much). She exudes an integrity and a down-to-earth nature that counters the image-makers’ glamorising of her. She is almost alarmingly frank, for instance, about a period of deep unhappiness and suffering in her personal life. Now a single mother with two young children back home in Boston, she hates being away from them, she says, and finds the essential loneliness of a concert pianist’s career hard to handle.
She has always improvised, from when she began playing the piano as a small child in Caracas. “It was something very natural, my way of exploring the piano,” she explains. “Somehow it always made sense to me. When I was younger, they would always be 45-minute pieces, extended fantasies, you know. It was like playing out fairy tales, inventing characters.” Was there any feeling this was something she had to work on, to refine? “In my case, I don’t believe I can refine it. As you develop as an artist, and become more in tune with your voice, and it becomes stronger, improvisation stays as part of all of that. As a consequence, I think my improvisation has become more complex and intricate, more mature. But I’ve never sat down and said, ‘I’m going to work on my improvisation.’”
What about shaping a piece? Does she, for instance, consciously craft some of her improvisations in ternary, A-B-A form? “I don’t do any of that. I’ve never studied analysis or composition, or harmony and counterpoint. What I do comes from an instinctive viewpoint, without intellectual planning or reasoning. The reason I chose not to study those subjects, a flagrant heresy in the classical world, was perhaps to preserve that purity, that nonthought when I improvise. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if I go from A to B to A, because I just don’t know!”
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Hold on, what’s happening here? Montero is telling me that she doesn’t have a clue what is going on when she improvises? “Yes. When I improvise, there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s like jumping off a cliff.” Scary, then. “No! I love it. It’s absolute, complete freedom. There was nothing before and there will be nothing after. It exists only for the purpose of communicating something at that moment.”
She surely, then, at least avoids the danger of finding herself off track in the middle of an improvisation by thinking ahead? “But there’s no thought! I think what I do is hear the harmonies. I don’t know what they are, I just hear them and play them. But I can’t tell you what I’ve done after I’ve improvised. I have a sense of how I felt about it, but I wouldn’t be able to play it back unless I listened to a recording of myself and copied it. My brain is in shutdown mode. It’s very pleasing, actually!” And, by the sound of it, thera-peutic? “Yes. When I think about it, it’s almost like a cleansing.”
This is a far cry from the exhibitionistic motives that I had suspected, despite a tendency to improvise in a grand, headily emotional, Rachmaninov-like style. But style is, again, something she doesn’t really think about. And the new disc includes plenty that’s not in that late-Romantic mould: her delightfully mischievous South American take on the theme of the Hallelujah Chorus, for instance.
We talk about the pianists she most loves. There is Martha Argerich, of course, a real inspiration on many levels, personal and musical, who didn’t as much encourage her to embrace improvisation in her concerts as scold her for not having done so before. “She sort of called me stupid,” Montero recalls with smiling fondness. The meeting at which this exchange occurred, in 2001, changed everything for Montero. A phone call from Argerich to the right people was enough.
Who else besides Argerich? Annie Fischer, Sergio Fiorentino, Boris Berezovsky, Hamish Milne (her teacher at the Royal Academy of Music). And, from older generations, Edwin Fischer, Rach-maninov, Vladimir Sofronitsky. “I went through a period when I listened a lot to the old pianists, and I fell in love with that way of playing.” I ask if that infatuation was because so many of today’s artists, shackled by the perfectionist demands of the recording studio, have sacrificed character and risk for the sake of getting it right.
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“That’s exactly the problem. That’s why there’s often this static feeling in concerts. Unfortunately, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that the artist is meant to be a god, and is meant to deliver exactly what you hear in a recording. Many artists are crushed by that. We’re human. And, if I can do my bit to bring a little more humanity onto the classical stage, less perfection and more soul, more joy, well that’s good. When did we lose the joy of playing classical music? It’s almost like we have to suffer. Enough with depression!” Quite.