Gabriela Montero's Gift

In the world of classical music there is a great divide: between the remarkably talented who will never make it and the truly gifted. The gift, in the case of Gabriela Montero, is an ear, or brain, or something that allows her to not just play the notes that Beethoven wrote 200 years ago, but to improvise, to riff on Beethoven the way Jazz musicians routinely do with their music.

Making it up as you go along, for classical musicians, can be suicidal in that extremely uptight world. But Gabriela, a young Venezuelan-born American pianist manages to get away with it. As correspondent Morley Safer reports, her sheer talent has won over the critics. It's an amazing gift that came naturally and very, very early.

By the time she was eight years old, it was clear there was nothing normal about Gabriela Montero's talent: she was featured on Venezuelan television, playing Chopin. And even then, she couldn't wait to finish and start making up her own music.

"It was always the most pleasurable thing and the most fun. I just sat down and improvised," she says. "It's how I communicate the best. The way I see it is that music is not something that's scholarly, but a means to an end. You know, to tell the stories that I want to tell."

You would think, given her early start, that Gabriela Montero's career path would have been straight and uncomplicated.

But you'd be wrong. For in the starchy world of classical music, she is something of a misfit, right down to the tips of her remarkable fingers.

Asked if she has the hands of an artiste, Gabriela says laughing, "I hope so. Because you know, I don't find them particularly pretty."

"They're small. They look very big when I play, which is really funny. People think I have mammoth hands, but I don't," she says.

People can be forgiven for that. Gabriela Montero's hands make music that is dramatic, passionate and larger than life.

"Do you, in your most idle moments, are you hearing music?" Safer asks.

"All the time. It's a 24 hour radio," she says, laughing. "And I cannot shut it off, it is the worst part."

She is the hottest rising star in the classical music world, and the most controversial, as well.

That's because of her double life: in London one night, playing the classics at Queen Elizabeth Hall, in New York another night, improvising at Joe's Pub, playing Bach's Toccata.

Improvising, sitting down and playing whatever comes into your head, is what Jazz musicians do. "I can't tell you how much fun it is to improvise," Gabriela tells Safer. "I just love it."

In their days, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart did it too. But in the classical world, the practice died out a century ago. And today, improvisation is still largely frowned upon.

"It's spontaneous creation. It's spontaneous music making. And is it perfect? I don't know. It's not, I mean it's something that is just born and dies," Gabriela says.Her performances are often half and half: first, the classics, played as they were written, and then improvisation, based on a suggestion from the audience.

"The reason why I started asking the public for a theme was because they wouldn't believe me otherwise. They just think it's something that's been constructed, written, and I've learned," she explains.

"With the public the improvisation brings this closeness and this interaction. And we live in a very interactive world. So I think it's very appropriate now to start breaking barriers and to bring this free element into the classical world," Gabriela adds.

Asked what her process is, how her mind works, Gabriela says, "I don't know. My interviews tend to be quite short because it's always the same answer. I don't know how it happens."

Safer tested her talent for making it up off the cuff, suggesting some popular themes to play with.

Asked to play the "Star Wars" theme, Gabriela took the theme not back to the future, but back to the past.

"Do I detect a little Bach and Beethoven in that Star Wars?" Safer asks.

"Oh absolutely, absolutely," Gabriela says.

Asked to play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as a tango, she improvised and played the nursery rhyme in a Latin style, with a big finish.

And "Yesterday," the lovely Beatles anthem, took on equal parts McCartney and Montero.

"You say it goes different places. But you send it different places," Safer notes.

"I don't really send it. It sends me, you know, the more I get into it. And let's say, after a few improvisations it just becomes really wild. Something takes over which leads me in some direction," she explains.

She was born in Caracas, Venezuela, where her musical life started, literally, in the crib. Her mother taped Gabrielita figuring out songs, like "Happy Birthday" and such on a toy piano.

At the time of the recording, her mother estimates Gabriela was 17 or 18 months old. The toddler could play the piano and pick out a tune before she could even walk.

By age 11, she was at a crossroads: already a big fish in a small musical pond. Her parents decided to bring her to the United States to study.

"I think they felt it was their responsibility to provide everything they could for me to develop. And that's what they did," Gabriela says.

The family settled in Miami, where as a teenager, she was profiled on television. It was a carefree portrait of the artist as a young woman.

But privately, there was doubt and frustration. Gabriela's teacher questioned her talent, and belittled her improvising.

"I was told that there was nothing special about it. In a way, almost making it sound like it was embarrassing. And in classical music, there was no space for this. So I didn't. And I started to feel ashamed," she recalls.

Yet she dutifully rehearsed the classics, note for note. But as her teen years gave way to young adulthood, she soured on the musical life altogether.

"Those were the hard years. Those were the years where I really lost my way," she says.

For two years, she didn't touch a piano. She became a nomad, wandering back to Caracas, then back to the United States, to Canada, to Europe. Gabriela, 36, says she has moved 34 times in her life. "And eight different countries. Moving companies love me," she says.

Along the way there were two marriages and two children. She took more lessons, played occasional concerts, but tried to convince herself she could live without music.

"I thought being enriched by life, by falling in love, by even having your heart broken, by having kids, by all these things, this was the real meaning of things," she says.

Her mother and father didn't want her to give up performing, but they didn't want to push too hard, either.

"Gabriela in a sense has been fighting her talent all her life," her mother tells Safer. "She's always said, 'I can only do the piano. It's like, you know, I don't have any options.'"

"The talent was a prison in a certain way?" Safer asks.

"I think so. I think so," she replies.

It was another pianist, Martha Argerich, who helped her break out of that prison. Argerich is the Argentine musician many consider the world's greatest living pianist. Gabriela sought her out for advice.

"I wanted to talk about being a mother, being a woman, being an artist. You know, I was still very confused. Around one in the morning I ended up playing for her after having a few too many beers in a local bar with my friends," she remembers.

She played Beethoven and she improvised.

Argerich, who's known as "The Lioness," saw in Montero an equally ferocious talent. She assured Gabriela there was a place for her in the music world, improvisations and all.

"When Martha speaks, people listen. And she started to talk about me. And this kind of got me into this movement of things which I really needed," Gabriela explains.

So now, five years later, along with the Bach and the Beethoven, concert hall audiences get a taste of her making it up as she goes along. She has said goodbye to old friends in Caracas once again and moved to New York.

Her CDs are bestsellers and the critics love her. She has even become a cover girl for classical music, and a thankful one, at that.

"I have my kids, my beautiful daughters, whom I adore. And I have the music and this sense of purpose," she says.

It has been a long musical journey.

Twenty-two years after playing Rachmaninoff's signature second piano concerto, a brooding and romantic work the composer wrote during a bad patch in his own life, after doing battle with her own doubts and demons, she plays it in London.

She plays it, as someone once said of Rachmaninoff himself, with fingers of steel and a heart of gold. A musician finally at peace with her talent – and herself.

"I think it was fate," she says. "I could never really get away from it, you know. It was what I'm meant to be."
Produced By David Browning