Fame Is Finding Lexington’s Gabriela Montero
By Jeremy Eichler
Globe Staff / February 15, 2009
You might have caught a glimpse of her on Inauguration Day as the historic transfer of power was heralded not with martial blasts of a military band but with the softer eloquence of chamber music. Television cameras lingered on luminaries Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, but she was there, too: an intensely focused woman shivering at the piano, jabbing the keys through thick black gloves without fingertips.
That was Gabriela Montero.
“I have the gloves right over there,” she said, laughing as she gestured between sips of tea at her kitchen table a couple of weeks later. “It was such a beautiful moment and such an honor to be there. But my God was it cold!”
The inauguration was only one of the many stages on which Montero will be appearing this year. At 38, she is a rising star on the classical music scene who also happens to be a single mother living on a quiet block in Lexington, a virtuoso with a minivan. Increasingly famous in the broader musical world yet still almost invisible here, she has a remarkable talent for classical improvisation—a skill she suppressed for years but that has now become her calling card.
Typically at live performances, she spins out elaborate fantasies on themes that audi ence members call out on the spot, ranging from melodies by Bach to, quite recently, the fight song of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
But beyond her impromptu keyboard soliloquies, Montero is a serious interpreter of the great composers of the past, one whose performances are often filled with a natural spontaneity and deeply felt emotion. And if the expressive range in her playing has perhaps a more searching quality than one typically encounters, that is because Montero is herself a musical wanderer who has searched most of her life for an authentic relationship to the art form she both loves and cannot escape. She hears music inside her head—not metaphorically but literally—24 hours a day. Sometimes it is so loud, she says, it wakes her in her sleep.
As a former child prodigy, Montero has wrestled with the blessings and burdens of her gift for as long as she can remember. She was nearly done in by one negative teacher, she quit piano twice, and she was finally set on course by the reigning queen of the keyboard, Martha Argerich. These days Montero’s career is flowering, especially in Europe. This week she returns to the Boston Philharmonic for performances of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in Sanders Theatre and Jordan Hall, beginning Thursday.
In person, Montero has a warm presence and the introspective conversational style of the psychologist she once seriously considered becoming.
She is also notably open about the vicissitudes of her own artistic quest—and there have been many. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Gabriela, why is all of this happening to you now that you’re 38? What happened in your 20s?’ It was life. It was about finding things, finding my own reasons for being a musician. All of that took some time.”
Montero was born into a middle-class family in Caracas, and a toy piano was placed in her crib when she was only 7 months old. The spark was immediate. Rather than banging on the keys as most babies do, her first instinct was to prod them one at a time. She was soon playing the lullabies that her mother sang to her at night.
At 3, she was given a Chickering upright piano, and presented her first concert to all the neighbors: lullabies, children’s songs, and the Venezuelan national anthem. She had also started to improvise.
Formal studies began soon afterward, but when she was 8, Montero’s parents uprooted the entire family so that she could study with a new teacher in Miami. It proved a disastrous match, and even today she prefers not to talk about the experience. “It was just so negative and it took me in a direction that was completely different,” she said. Her improvising talent was “put in a drawer and locked up. It was as if I had an ability that was not meant to be shared, or was of no use. Looking back, it was forfeiting a huge part of myself.”
The lessons went on for 10 long years until she was 18, at which point Montero quit piano altogether and returned to Caracas, volunteering in hospitals and searching for meaningful work far from the piano. But the music in her head—she calls it “24-hour radio”—did not cease when she stopped playing. “My nature was haunting me,” she said. After two years, she relented and sent off a tape to London’s Royal Academy of Music. She was accepted with a full scholarship.
Her teacher in London, pianist Hamish Milne, helped her rebuild her spirits and consolidate her technique, and in her mid-20s she entered the venerable Chopin Competition in Warsaw. She won third prize, but more important, experienced a kind of revelation about her own playing.
“When I sat down to play in Warsaw, I felt heat coming through my body,” she said. “I don’t know what it was, but it was a physical sensation. I was so connected, and I played with a sense of meaning, and pain, and emotion. Everything was real. I was finally starting to reach that core, that sense of why I would ever be drawn to music. It was a sense of being connected to something far bigger and far more beautiful. That was the beginning of my discovering music. I was 25 years old.” Continued...