Concert Review: Martha Argerich, Charles Dutoit & The Russian Classical Masters

I once had a dream in which two lions of classical music played the leading roles -- pianist Martha Argerich and conductor Charles Dutoit. The dream was set in the kitchen of a Mediterranean villa. Dutoit was backing out of the room as Argerich threw china plates from a sideboard at him. They missed their mark and only feelings seem to have been hurt.

I know not whether Argerich and Dutoit were married in my dream, but once upon a time they were in real life and so my nocturnal interlude involving them may not have been far fetched.

These are two fiery people, and the passion with which they imbue their performances was again on display Friday afternoon as Dutoit conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra and Argerich soloed in Verizon Hall of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.

Catching the Martha and Chuck Show, as the Dear Friend & Conscience and I call it, has become an annual ritual for us.

We first saw them together at the historic Academy of Music in Philadelphia in 2000 and at Avery Fisher Hall in New York's Lincoln Center in 2004. Both excellent shows in sonically challenged spaces.

Then in 2006 at Carnegie Hall in New York City during the Philadelphia Orchestra's annual sojourn to that great room, a ritual that began in the 1930s when orchestra was led by the legendary Leopold Stokowski, one of only seven music directors in its storied 108 year history.

Anyhow, the box office had misplaced our tickets, so we were comped to the front row.

Carnegie Hall has a sound to die for no matter where you sit. But while those seats were worth bragging about, they were a little too close to the action unless you are really into ankles. In contrast, the seats that the DF&C had gotten as a birthday treat for me last year at the Kimmel Center were in the First Tier with a commanding view overlooking the left side of the stage. (I daresay that the Kimmel, with sumptuous hand-crafted hardwoods from ceiling to floor, may even be acoustically superior to Carnegie Hall.)

Through no fault of our own, the DF&C, my son and I ended up in the Orchestra for the Friday show because of a ridiculous -- and I hope eventually self-defeating -- new policy whereby seats for this and other concerts are available to subscribers months beforehand but barely a month out for mere single-seat mortals like myself who are not in a subscriberly mood. Long story short: We were lucky to get any seats at all.

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The DF&C has noted that the passions of Argerich and Dutoit seemed to be drawn from different hemispheres. Indeed.

Argerich is Argentine-born and a resident of Switzerland who has played with every major orchestra in the world but seldom solos these days. Dutoit is Swiss, has homes in five countries, has visited over 170 countries and has led every major orchestra in the world.

At the heart of the Friday afternoon program were two Russian masterpieces -- Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concert No. 1 in D-flat major, Op. 10 and Dmitiri Shostakovich's Piano Concert No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35.

Argerich galloped through these densely complex concertos with her trademark passion-drenched virtuosity, the piano soaring above the orchestra in sonic shock waves that reached a thunderous peak at the conclusion of each piece, plopping us back in our seats with the stunning realization that we had been transported out of our bodies to some divine place -- or places. I came as close to feeling what Prokofiev and Shostakovich had sought to convey to the head and heart of the listener as I ever have in numerous listenings to these and their other compositions. And was most grateful that there was an intermission between the two.

(David Bilger, who for all the world looks like he walked off the set of an old Lawrence Welk Show, joined Argerich to brightly solo on trumpet on the Shostakovich.)

The concertos were bookended in the front with Maurice Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales and at the end with Pictures at an Exhibition, the best known work of another Russian great, Modest Musorgsky.

Pictures was among the symphonic works on my first classical album -- a three LP boxed set purchased at an A&P supermarket with newspaper route money when I was in my early teens. I know Pictures as well as, say, the Grateful Dead's Dark Star or Bob Marley's Exodus, to name two favorite anthems from other times and places, and "The Gates of Kiev," the 10th and final movement of Pictures, was a perfect ending to just about the best birthday gift that a father could give a son.