GRANDE DAME TERRIBLE

The young tigress, however, is now fifty-six years old, and in recent months, her record label, Deutsche Grammophon, has reissued several of her most popular albums — perhaps in acknowledgement that its bad girl is graying. Can the enfant terrible turn grande dame? Or is there such a thing as the grande dame terrible? These recordings, chiefly of Romantic piano concertos, reveal Argerich both as she was and as she remains, and they will keep her legend alive long after she has retired.

That legend began early, when Argerich was a girl in Buenos Aires. Visiting pianists from Europe would be taken to marvel at the young wonder, and in 1955, when she was fourteen, one of them, Friedrich Gulda, took her to Vienna to become his student. Two years later, Argerich won a pair of the most prestigious competitions in music: the Busoni and the Geneva. In 1960, her debut album provoked gasps around the world: She may have lacked musical depth, but her fingers were fantastic, flying across the piano with rare accuracy and confidence. But then she suddenly suspended her performing career, preferring to study without distraction. And when she re-emerged in 1965, at age twenty-four, to win the Chopin competition in Warsaw, her stardom was assured.

During her five years away from public view, Argerich was the protege of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, one of music’s most notorious eccentrics. He must have influenced the young woman profoundly, for she resembles him in numerous ways. A freewheeling pianist given to fanciful (if often persuasive) interpretations, Michelangeli had enormous technical ability: The French master Alfred Cortot, on first hearing him, cried, “A new Liszt is born!” Michelangeli, however, was too troubled — too strange, really — to enjoy a normal career. He played infrequently and tended to cancel the concerts he did schedule. He was startlingly inconsistent, performing gloriously one night, abominably the next. Preferring to sleep all day and practice all night, he proved mystifying as a teacher: His students were often tied in knots, uncertain how to please him. But he did have undeniable genius to impart, and his progeny — including the redoubtable Maurizio Pollini — all play well, if with excessive abandon and muscularity.

Argerich, too, is a loner, one who schedules only a handful of concerts and cancels them with something like predictability. (So unreliable is she that many musical organizations refuse to book her at all, much as they would welcome the ticket sales.) She is a zealous guardian of her privacy, granting virtually no interviews, which only adds to her allure. Deutsche Grammophon, for its part, pleads with her to enter the studio for a few more pressings, but Argerich imperiously declines, not needing the money, the attention, or the professional satisfaction.

The company has sent to the stores a boxed set of eight concertos. The first is the Beethoven C Major, an excellent test of any pianist’s worth. Here, Argerich is deplorable: lawless with her tempos, offensive in her phrasing, and altogether a nuisance. Her tone is brittle and blunt, and she is constitutionally opposed to rounding an edge.

And yet, typically, she is not quite a failure: The first movement has a jaunty power, and, as always, there is an electricity behind her playing. Her scales are tight and controlled, and she makes sensibly spare use of the sustaining pedal. While aggressive, she stops just short of brutality. She is willful and impetuous with the music, but we continue to listen, if only to discover what the next outrage will be.

The opening of the second movement, surprisingly, is almost limpid. But Argerich soon lapses into her customary thumping and compromises the Largo’s loveliness. The rondo — a fleet, delightful creation — she stabs at, as though angry with it. Her playing is crisp and precise, but it lacks grace, and she is prone to quick, unmusical crescendos (annoying bursts of sound that Beethoven did not intend and would not condone). And her specialty — in every sort of music, but especially that of the Classical period — is the misaccented note, which badly distorts the line. Argerich never allows us to forget she is there, never permits Beethoven to step forward. She ends her portion of the rondo with an exaggerated ritardando, spoiling the conclusion that the composer has planned.

In the Chopin E-minor concerto — which ought to be her bread and butter — Argerich is even worse. Her opening chord, which should be a firm, authoritative statement, is instead a violent assault. When she introduces the movement’s principal theme, she does not sing (as a properly lyrical pianist would), but produces a metallic, distasteful sound. At times, she merely slaps at the keys, neglecting to play into them. This is a bravura piece, to be sure, but also a poetic one — and Argerich treats it as an excuse for exhibitionism. Even when she should luxuriate, she hurries past. She can jolt and electrify an audience, but seldom does she melt one. And when she reaches the madly virtuosic coda that concludes the first movement, she deprives us of its thrill — precisely because the speed and fervor the coda requires she has been using throughout.

Elsewhere in the boxed set, however, Argerich is commendable, even exemplary — as with Michelangeli, much seems to depend on the alignment of the planets. She gives a solid account of the Schumann concerto, including its Intermezzo, which, though simple, is easy to ruin. She rips through the final Allegro with more force than is traditional, but it proves justifiable, and she is sympathetically supported by her woefully underrated conductor, Mstislav Rostropovich.

The Liszt E-flat concerto, meanwhile, is a bombastic, overwrought work, unabashedly a showpiece conceived for the showiest pianist of them all — the composer himself. Liszt would have liked Martha Argerich (for more reasons than one), and she makes for his concerto the strongest possible case. Ferocity, explosiveness, and speed become this work as they do few others: It is a beast of a piece, and it calls for a beast of a pianist.

So too the Prokofiev C Major, an infinitely better composition and one for which Argerich has an obvious affinity. It is demonic, furious, and supercharged, lending itself to Argerich’s extremism. A certain pugilistic quality — abhorrent in most music — is desirable in Prokofiev, and Argerich all but sics herself on the score, tearing through its jagged and delirious passages. She is appropriately cool and severe in the second movement, and the Allegro is positively dizzying: It is marked ma non troppo — “but not too much” — but for Argerich, there is hardly ever any troppo, and, for once, she pulls it off.

Now long past her days as a Wunderkind — “See the Pretty, Wild-haired, South American Girl Play Like a Fiend!” — Argerich has a world of repertory before her, and she should explore it. There is nothing beyond her technically, as she demonstrates in, for example, the Rachmaninoff D-minor concerto (the work that received quite a run thanks to the movie Shine). But she should aim for a more thorough musicianship, trusting that she will always be able to wow a crowd. For all of her infuriating peculiarities, she is too gifted to remain a mere cult figure. Michelangeli is a fitting model: He, too, was no lamb, but he was a splendid colorist and a complete pianist. Argerich is unquestionably a marvel. But she should discard her more obnoxious habits and resolve at last to be great — that is, truly and forever great.

Jay Nordlinger, associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, writes regularly on classical music.