Martha Argerich, the Argentine pianist who won the Chopin Competition in 1965, plays Ravel’s G major concerto with the Oxford Philharmonic at the Barbican.
Martha Argerich, who won the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1965, plays Ravel’s G major concerto with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra at the Barbican Centre on Sunday 14 February 2027.
Argerich was born in Buenos Aires in 1941 and gave her first concert at eight. As a teenager she moved to Europe and studied in Austria with Friedrich Gulda, whom she counts among her strongest influences.
At sixteen she won both the Geneva and the Busoni international competitions, and the Chopin prize began her international career. Since the 1980s she has given most of her time to collaboration, with partners such as Nelson Freire, Mischa Maisky and Gidon Kremer.
The orchestra works with her regularly, and the Barbican is the London date of a programme it gives first at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre.
The evening opens with Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, narrated by her daughter Annie Dutoit-Argerich. Argerich then plays the Ravel, a concerto steeped in jazz, and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony closes the night.
Marios Papadopoulos founded the orchestra in 1998 as the Oxford Philomusica, and it is the orchestra in residence at the University of Oxford. He plays the piano in the Saint-Saëns.