Gabriela Montero

Gabriela Montero

'I never considered myself different or special,' says the Venezuelan-American pianist Gabriela Montero. 'All this recent commotion is odd, as for me it's like talking!' Montero is referring to her remarkable talent for improvisation, which has been wowing audiences both in the US and abroad. Her performances offer a welcome dose of spontaneity, something all too rare in the classical music world - with its solemn worship of technical perfection and rigid schedules.

Montero, whose concerts usually feature both traditional repertoire and improvisations based on audience-suggested themes, grew up in a non-musical family in Caracas, Venezuela. She was given a toy piano as a toddler and started improvising on nursery rhymes soon after. She recalls that she was supposed to get a doll, 'but for some reason my grandma insisted I be given the piano', she explains. Her mother and grandmother had a long discussion about it, 'but my grandma was a Taurus and won the debate! I think she had some kind of intuition about me.'

That intuition proved prescient. Montero gave her first solo performance at age five and performed a Haydn concerto with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra at eight. She has remained in contact with the extraordinary ensemble, the flagship orchestra of 'El Sistema' - the state-sponsored training program (directed by the visionary crusader José Antonio Abreu) that produced the young superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Montero, who estimates she has performed around 15 different concertos with Dudamel (who was recently appointed music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) at the helm, still plays with the talented Venezuelan musicians at least once a year. The first time Montero, a tall woman, played with him, she told him, 'You are so small, but I can tell that you are great.'

'You are so small, but I can tell that you are great'

At age eight, Montero was awarded a scholarship from the Venezuelan government to study in the US and moved with her family to Miami. At 12 she won the Baldwin National Competition and AMSA Young Artist International Piano Competition, and performed the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1 with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. But Montero speaks regretfully of her studies in the US, as her teacher there discouraged her natural affinity for improvisation.

Improvisation has always been second nature for Montero, who later studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London with professors including Hamish Milne. Her effortless gift would have been considered less unusual in the 18th and 19th centuries, when composers such as Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt were all virtuoso improvisers. Concerts, much less formally organized to begin with, were often ad-lib and included fantasies and spontaneous variations on themes suggested by the audience.

In the 20th century, the chance music of composers like John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Pierre Boulez included improvisatory elements. But the art of improvisation was largely abandoned for a focus on precision and perfection, a difficult synthesis with the unpredictability of public improvisation. Organists have been the one exception, as have a few specialists such as the pianist and scholar Robert Levin, who has been a proponent of improvisation in cadenzas.

• Print
• Email to friend
• Discuss