Newly Released Martha Argerich Recordings, In Time for 75th Birthday

Apart from a recording of Schumann’s Kinderszenen taken from a concert at her own festival in Lugano in 2007, and the very occasional Scarlatti sonata played as an encore, there have been no new discs of Martha Argerich playing solo piano repertoire for more than 30 years. Alongside the abundance of recent recordings of her chamber music and two-piano performances, chiefly from Lugano, and a select handful of concertos, companies have had to raid their archives to find previously unpublished solo performances from the beginnings of Argerich’s glittering career in the 1960s and 70s.

All the recordings rediscovered for Deutsche Grammophon’s collection, and released to mark the great pianist’s 75th birthday on 5 June date from the 1960s, both before and after she won the Warsaw Chopin competition in 1965. They are tapes from west German radio, immaculately transferred, and alongside works she would later record commercially (Prokofiev’s Toccata and Seventh Sonata, Ravel’s Sonatine and Gaspard de la Nuit), the other pieces are new to the Argerich discography, DG reckon. Read more at The Guardian