FINDING acceptance for performing improvisations in tandem with a classical career brought the balance that Montero had missed as an artist, she says.
It also renewed her confidence. To counter suggestions that her improvisations were less than spontaneous, she began asking concertgoers for suggestions, instantly weaving soap opera themes, pop tunes and nursery rhymes into flowing original works remarkable for their complexity and far-ranging classical references.
It's like a domino effect, she says. "One note begins and the rest follow. I'm never afraid of it. It's just heaven. To be able to walk out onstage and not know what's going to happen, to just create it at that moment, it's wonderful." She laughs. "And I don't have to worry about practicing anything."
Montero's ideal concert would be a throwback to the salon concerts of past centuries, intimate gatherings for music-making. "It was really about a kind of communion together. I feel in a lot of my concerts, this is what starts to happen. And this is what I love."
Conductor Thomas Wilkins, who will lead the Bowl's Tchaikovsky event, feels that Montero "is the kind of artist that the classical music world is clamoring for." By reaching out to those who aren't hard-core classical fans, he says, "she breaks down the formality that is a disguise for a brick wall between the audience and the artist."
Not that Montero stints when playing another composer's work. She likens Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto to "a big animal, a big bear that at any moment can eat you up, but at the same time there's these great moments of beauty and fairy dust. It's like an incredibly poetic scenery of mythical characters."
Whether improvising or interpreting a written piece, however, "I like to get in there and dive in and leave my heart and everything on the stage," Montero says. "That's the only reason that I have found meaning and truth and value in what I'm doing now." And that will be her quest always, she says: "to go deeper and deeper in music and in myself as a musician."
By Lynne Heffley