★★★★ The return of the Algerian Festival, with the brilliant pianist as the main figure, provided musical events of the highest level with stupendous artists. But this great festival of music, Like all good things, it had to end one day. And the ending allowed us to appreciate, once again, fascinating facets of this piano legend.
The beginning of the last presentation was with the Prokofiev’s Concerto for piano and orchestra No. 3 one of the works most closely associated with Argerich. She performed it countless times, recorded it, and for many she is the quintessential performer of this piece. The concert is tremendously demanding, intense, at times stormy, sometimes playful, sometimes brilliant. Only someone like Argerich can achieve that in this work everything flows naturally and freshly, and that the contrasts and changes of character are perceived as spontaneous as powerful. Together with the forcefulness of the famous pianist, Luis Gorelik conducted the Stable Orchestra with precision, although some occasional imbalances were perceived that did not tarnish the final result. The applause, clamorous and persistent, made Argerich return to offer, as an encore, a poetic version of the first number of Schumann’s “Children’s Scenes”.
In the second part – you, after the energetic Dvoák Carnival Overture, Argerich returned to the stage, this time with the wonderful pianist Dong Hyek Lim to interpret, together with members of the orchestra, the suite The Carnival of the Animals of Camille Saint-Saens. The actress Annie Dutoit Argerich, daughter of Martha and Charles Dutoit, She acted as narrator, reciting with grace and ease the texts in French that Francis Blanche wrote to introduce each number of the work. The piano duo was extraordinary and the musicians of the Stable Orchestra, with Gorelik on the podium, they brought liveliness and subtlety to their interventions. All of them willingly joined the humorous text and music, especially Argerich, very smiling and relaxed.
Acclaimed by the public that filled from end to end the colon room, the musicians returned to repeat the final number of the work of Saint-Saënsin a brilliant closing for what is already, without a doubt, one of the great cultural events of this year.
