Gabriela Montero's Gift

How A Piano Virtuosa Rocks The Music World By Improvising Old Classics

(CBS)  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."

[goodsamarata]

It is because of Gabriela Montero that I learned classical music had always had elements of improvisations in it until someone in the early 20 century came up with the idea that classical scores should be rigidly interpreted. How boring it is to hear the same pieces done exactly the same way by just about everyone and that's why I avoid going to classic music concerts. There are, of course, some classical pieces that I just can't resist seeing them played live. But I hope Montero will inspire a change in this industry before it goes the way of Catholic priests who are not allowed to marry: Forgotten and ignored by most, while driving newcomers away because of their frigid ideology.

[kiwiak]

It is so sad that we as people do not understand that music is alive. Gabriela Montero gives new life to old music, not in an effort to interpret the original writers vision but to expand it. I really enjoyed hearing what she is doing with the music. Listen to all the Masters, once they mastered the music they extemporised.

Inspiring !!!
THANK YOU CBS
Please provide the video online !!!
Classical music needs to reinvent itself and hopefully this is a sign of better times ahead.
d|b