It’s the middle of the week and our ears and minds are tired; it’s time for some music that’s a little more delicate than usual.

The first time I visited Buenos Aires I randomly met a group of people at some hostel who were big into the Argentinian contemporary dance scene. Not exactly your average hostel crowd. I tagged along with them for a night on the town in my one change of clothes, during which we saw a beautiful dance performance followed by a classic Buenos Aires pub crawl. It was a wonderfully unpretentious approach to “high culture”.. the kind of evenings I aspire to.

Anyway, I was/am researching a post on Argentinian pop when I remembered this night and tried to recall the name of the dance production. This led to sites about Buenos Aires’ classical music scene where eventually I learnt that Martha Argerich, one of the greatest modern-day pianists, was born in Buenos Aires. She got her musical start there, studying and performing her first concerts before leaving for Europe at the age of 14.

Argerich: perfect for today’s post. We’ll put aside tango and rock nacional for a second and have a close listen to a truly gifted pianist while thinking of one of my favourite cities in the world, Buenos Aires.

I saw Martha Argerich perform in Paris last year at the Salle Pleyel. She seemed indifferent to the crowd (what I’ve since learned is her trademark) and appeared to be coming down with a head cold, but the music was beautiful. She’s famous for hating to play solo and occasionally cancels her own concerts at the last minute. This night, however, she showed up, wowed the crowd, and even played on her own for a bit.

For those of you who don’t know Martha Argerich don’t worry since she goes to great lengths not to be known. Though she’s a tireless promoter of young classical musicians, Argerich herself rarely does interviews and plays few (public) concerts. When she does perform it’s rarely alone since she says that she gets “lonely” on stage. Regardless of these idiosyncrasies you’ll often hear her name mentioned in the same breath as the likes of ‘Vladimir Horowitz’ and other great modern pianists.

The piece we’ll hear today is a 1980 composition by Alexandre Rabinovitch, performed by himself and Argerich, recorded at the Radiostudio Bern on November 24, 1993. It’s quite different from the regular batch of Chopin, Bach and Prokofiev usually associated with Martha Argerich, but it’s beautiful.. I love it.. and it’s probably more suited to this site than most of her recordings. Amazingly, you can now buy it at Emusic.

Scholars with a good ear will hear that “the emphatic assertion of the motif in D major from Brahms’s lied, Es liebt sich so lieblich in Lenze, is counterbalanced by the insistent sadness of the Serenade in D minor by Schubert.”

The rest of us will just hear a beautiful, flowing work for two pianos.

Now.. if Rob would only start his classical music audioblog, then we’d all be set.

Martha Argerich & Alexandre Rabinovitch - Liebliches Lied