We noticed the discreet Avanti label when Martha Argerich moved her musical meetings from Lugano to northern Germany. Avanti has released two boxes of this newly held festival in Hamburg without fanfare. Fans of the Argentinian pianist, who has snubbed Montreal music lovers since the departure of Charles Dutoit, will find here a pairing of two concertos recorded with the Israel Philharmonic at the end of December 2019. 2e of Beethoven, Argerich engraved it for Ricordi while directing, then with Sinopoli, Abbado and Ozawa, without counting a concert available in digital with Barenboim. It is this last one and this one that are totally magical in the dosage of the shades of the 2e movement, Shani’s orchestra being more rhythmically sharp in the finale. For Ravel, the versions are innumerable because of the concerts in Lugano. Faced with the two Abbado-DG versions (1967 and, still a tick above, 1989), this Argerich-Shani from 2019 holds up wonderfully with its unpredictable orchestral and pianistic freshness.
To see in video