Gabriela Montero - Name your tune
8 August 2008
Gabriela Montero is knocking the stuffiness out of classical renditions with her audience-led improvisations, discovers Chitra Ramaswamy
A BAROQUE version of The Beatles' 'Yesterday' 'Happy Birthday' Tchaikovsky style? Bach's D minor Invention with a bossa nova twist? The Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero can play all this and what’s more, she can do this on the spot. We don’t expect classical pianists to stop a Rachmaninov recital to ask the audience what they should play next. Or for someone to jump up, hold their mobile phone aloft and sound out a ringtone for the performer to improvise. But this is exactly what happens in Montero's thrilling and unconventional concerts.
"A lot of the time, I've never heard the melodies that people give me, but something interesting always comes out of it," says the 38-year-old who has taken it upon herself to breathe new life into the long neglected art of classical improvisation. All she needs is someone who can sing a tune and off she goes.
"It's subconscious and I never know where it's going to take me," she says of her remarkable gift. The first recording of Montero's improvisation was by her mother who noticed her daughter playing the lullabies she sang to her on a toy piano. She was just 18 months old.
"It's certainly not theory based because I never studied counterpoint or harmony. I make a point of saying that – and I know it can work against me in the classical world – because my relationship with music is very instinctive. I have always been an improviser, the music has always come from a different place for me, and I memorise by ear. It's a complete freedom because there is nothing structured or intellectual tying me down."
When Montero is on stage she enters what she calls "a white void". Her mind empties, she feels as though she is being taken over, and all she can hear is the original melody. It sounds a little alchemic and terrifying but she insists "it's wonderful".
Classical improvisation may be rare but it's nothing new. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were all renowned for their ability to create sophisticated improvisations and they also allowed people to test their skills in public. Yet the practice was abandoned with the end of the Golden Age and became associated with jazz in the 20th century. Montero disregards the notion of the classical musician as a god striving for technical mastery and replaces it with a manifesto of expressiveness and spontaneity.
"Who I am on stage is exactly the same as who I am off the stage," she says. "There is no division. We're coming to an age of wanting to experience again that moment where music is borne out of nothing. Great pianists of the past were incredible masters but they also used music to speak, to send messages. It wasn't about perfection, it was about communicating the soul of a piece. To do that you have to get in there and take risks."
It took Montero many years, though, to do this openly. She may have debuted with Gustavo Dudamel's Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra when she was eight years old, but it took her much longer to – as she describes it – "come out of the closet". Her relationship with her instrument has always been fraught. "I've quit many times for extended periods and when I was younger I had no wish to be a concert pianist," she says. "I did not find my own reasons for doing this until very recently."
Montero does not come from a musical family and her parents didn't own a single piece of classical music until they discovered her talent. They moved from Venezuela to Miami so the young Montero could take up an American scholarship but in the following decade her teacher devalued her ability to improvise to such an extent that she gave up playing for two years.
"It's been a strange road," she says. "Not the typical route of the child prodigy who studies and studies and plays concerts. I was the prodigy who studied, rebelled, came back, rebelled again and has now found a purpose."
This is thanks to the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich. Seven years ago, Montero was considering giving up playing again. "I was interested in studying psychology, I had a child who was three, and I was finding it hard to make sense of how to be a mother, a woman and an artist," she says. She went to visit Argerich in Canada to ask her advice and was asked to play for her.
"She changed my life," says Montero. "She said the only other person she had heard who could do that was Gulder (the Austrian virtuoso nicknamed the 'terrorist pianist']. She said: 'Gabriela, why aren't you doing this in public? Nobody knows you can do this.' She poured her enthusiasm into me, called everyone, and people started calling me. It was like a baptism having someone like her giving value to my improvisation."
Starting to improvise in concert was liberating and she still gets a kick out of communicating directly with her audiences. This doesn't surprise me as even from Tuscany, where she is rehearsing when I speak to her, Montero radiates warmth and energy. Her concerts also have a reputation for being funny, which isn't something often said about the classical tradition.
Still, though, Montero struggles with her gift, particularly balancing her artistry with being a single mother of two small children. "It's difficult," she says. "My mother lives with me now and takes over when I'm not there. I'm a strange musician in that the time I get on the piano is very little. I'm doing the best that I can but I have terrible feelings of guilt being away. Playing piano is always a contradiction for me. You're never fully happy when you're with them (her children] because the music is missing, but when you're not... well, it's not easy. This profession is more designed for men but there are some of us who manage to pull it off."
She has released three successful albums with EMI – all featuring on-the-spot improvisation – and she is technologically savvy too, inviting people who visit her website to suggest melodies that she improvises on and then releases for free download. Her journey may not have been conventional but it is clear Montero has found her purpose. "After so many years and so many difficult moments I have found my place where I can be the concert pianist and the improviser," she says. "I don't feel I have to hide."