Fame Is Finding Lexington’s Gabriela Montero
By Jeremy Eichler
Globe Staff / February 15, 2009
...Continues from page 1. Despite her keyboard epiphany in Warsaw, Montero again lost her confidence and by 2001, she was living in Montreal, raising her first daughter, and planning a new career in psychology. Then Argerich, the great Argentine pianist, passed through town. Montero paid her a visit to get some career advice.
It turned out Argerich had little patience for Montero’s new ideas about psychology school. Instead, she insisted that Montero play for her. Montero agreed, reluctantly, and met Argerich the next night at Montreal’s Place des Arts at 1:30 in the morning.
She began with some Beethoven and Schumann, and then finally summoned the courage to improvise what she called a musical portrait of Argerich. When she finished some 20 minutes later, Argerich was speechless. “She said ‘Gabrielita, why doesn’t anybody know about this!’,” Montero recalled. “She was delighted like a little girl.”
It was a transformative night, as Argerich returned home and began spreading the word, and Montero soon started receiving phone calls from concert-presenters all over the world. With Argerich’s encouragement, she also began improvising during concerts, in both cadenzas and encores.
The art of improvisation has its own venerable history in classical music, and many of the great composers were known to be astounding improvisers. But the practice faded in the 20th century, becoming almost exclusively the province of jazz musicians. In fact it’s so rarely encountered in today’s buttoned-down classical world that Montero’s audiences were often totally perplexed (“people would look at me like I was going to strip naked”) or they would simply not grasp that the music was actually being invented on the spot.
So Montero started soliciting themes for the improvisation from the audience. Once she has the theme and begins to play, she described, “what happens is immediate, there’s no filter—it’s like a very direct stream that is downloaded at that moment.” Often her mind is improvising even when she’s doing other things. “It’s funny,” she said in the middle of a recent conversation, “there’s a little noise coming from the basement right now—probably from the heater. That has become the rhythmic background to an improvisation that’s going on in my head as I talk to you.”
Not all listeners have been won over by the style of her improvisations, but most agree that her talent in that area enables her to bring an arresting fluidity and naturalness to her interpretations of works by other composers.
“There is a freshness, a virulent intensity of creativity that is very, very rare,” said Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and a friend of Montero’s. “I’ve done concerts with her in South Africa and London and it’s always the same. The audience goes crazy as if she’s touching a part of them that is not normally reached in a musical performance.” In an e-mailed statement, Yo-Yo Ma, who helped bring Montero on board for the inauguration, praised the “simplicity and joy of life that is the essence of her music-making.”
As for her new local ties, Montero moved to the Boston area in 2007, drawn by the quality of its schools for her two girls, ages 11 and 6. “My romantic life until about five years ago had been very complex,” she said, “but the wonderful fruit of my relationships are my two beautiful daughters.”
Montero’s mother lives with them and helps out when Montero is on tour. With trips to Puerto Rico and Central Europe looming, she spoke openly about how taxing the soloist’s life can be. “I’m doing it, a lot of people are doing it, but I think it’s become a little superhuman, to be honest.”
Soloists don’t typically talk about such things, but Montero wishes it were otherwise. “I’d like to see artists sharing a bit more about how their lives really are,” she said, “what their struggles really are, and why they feel the sacrifice is worth it.”
When those questions are turned back to her, Montero does not hesitate. “Being a single mom in a way has given me the strength and the focus to also build my career, for my kids, for myself. I do it because I need to give my message through music—or the composer’s message—and to relate to Schumann, to Rachmaninoff, to Brahms. It connects me to their humanity, and to what links us as human beings. It’s a very instinctive need I have, like eating and sleeping. And finally, of course, it’s the development of who I am—who I was born as—and what I’ve found in my journey along the way. I think the whole point is to find a speaking voice with one’s hands, and then to tell a story. That for me is the beautiful part.”