February 12, 2013. Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto.
Tonight we improvise. We the audience provide the tunes by singing them out; Ms. Montero runs them through her keyboard and they come out like variations on a theme by a skilled composer.
She took the 1972 hit “Lara’s Theme” into a minor Chopinesque mode and developed it with the bravura she’d brought earlier in the program to Robert Schumann’s Fantasie in C. ” Bye Bye Blackbird” became three minutes of counterpoint that started out sounding like Bach and ended like Beethoven. Gershwin’s “Summertime” started in ragtime, morphed into the injured gaiety of Mozart, and ended up moaning like Rachmaninoff.
On her own, Ms. Montero proposed a concept theme—“Winter to Spring,” and proceded to conjure a crystalline melody over dark chords that melted into blips, drips and fluid trickles from which Spring sprang in the full flow of its fecundity. She finished the set with a jazzy interpretation of another Gershwin tune, “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing,” treating it as Broadway jazz, with touches of boogie and rag that developed into Klez jazz she rocked with a Rhumba beat.
As a performance it was pretty amazing, but, as they say, “was it art?” Not really. The music Ms. Montero made was novel, but nothing I’d want to listen to: certainly not as jazz, and definitely not compared to the real beauty of the works by Brahms and Schumann she interpreted in the first half of her concert.
She prepared us for her program that paired Three Intermezzos, Op. 117 by Brahms with Robert Schumann’s Fantasie in C by saying that both men were in love with the same woman. Be that as it may, Brahms’ first, Intermezzo was an exquisite gush of intimacy that developed as intense passion in conflict with itself. The lovely phrase that opens it brightens, then dims as it dips into the minor mode where Ms. Montero conjured the supernatural sense of a demon lover. Her touch was tender but in places perhaps a bit too vehement. From the second she conjured a barely concealed bitterness; the dark flavours of loss turn turbulent and are subdued at the end. In the slow third C# Minor work, the hypnotically repeated theme is buried under the accompaniment and rises, slowly towards the end as a ringing solo line.
This is music worth hearing and Ms. Montero compels you to listen.
Her Schumann was equally compelling. The benchmark performance of Schumann’s Fantasie, one the great Romantic pieces, is the one Sviatoslav Richter recorded in 1961. The rolling thunder laced with a light melody ringing from Ms. Montero’s keyboard brought Richter’s boldness to mind. As the first movement develops, she also touches the plaintive tenderness that Helene Grimaud made memorable in the same work.
The alternation of moods notated by Schumann here out of his love for his wife Clara, rose to an hallucinatory level in the gorgeous, floating tones of Montero’s piano. Her concluding movement was also memorable for the seamless transformation of touch from the rapid hammering that ended the previous movement, to the bell-like theme tolling gently to the accompaniment of gentle moonlit waves.
I will leave my recollection of the evening right there.