Gabriela Montero: ‘As a Latin American I really feel as though the Irish are the Latins of the north’

She’s an improviser. That’s the label that has become attached to Gabriela Montero. The Venezuelan pianist’s first concert in Ireland, at the National Concert Hall in 2006, consisted of nothing but improvisations. And you can always expect her to give improvised encores on themes suggested by someone from the audience, even when improvisation is not part of the advertised programme.

Improvisation has always been a part of classical-music life. Organists still do it a lot, as do performers of contemporary music. There are historic recordings of improvisations by the composers Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Edward Elgar. And Radio France’s Scarlatti 555, a megaproject to record all of Scarlatti’s sonatas, included improvisations on the sonatas. The recordings can still be found. But improvisation’s profile has long been in decline.

Montero has become a standard bearer for the kind of spontaneous music-making that so many people find mysterious, even though those people have no difficulty engaging in spontaneous speech, or even the spontaneous expression of complicated ideas they have never had before. Some of the rules are similar. Not everyone’s spontaneous ideas are interesting, and the distillation of ideas is usually an improvement.

When we meet, Montero and I get sidetracked into a discussion of Irishness way before we get around to music. She speaks of “this universal love of the Irish, the Irish humour, the Irish people, the Irish musicality, the Irish spirit, the twinkle in the eye. It really defines who you are as a people. And it’s all so positive and so endearing and so warm. As a Latin American I really feel as though the Irish are the Latins of the north. We have so much in common, so many good things in common. The bad things we have as Latin Americans more or less belong to us.”

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She does have some special insight about the charm – which, she says, “is the greatest asset, and will override almost anything else” – as she is married to the Cork baritone Sam McElroy.

In her concert later this week with the National Symphony Orchestra, under its principal conductor, Jaime Martín, she’s playing Mozart’s 1786 Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor, K491, one of the most probing the composer wrote.

“It’s a concerto that I absolutely adore,” she says. “I find it very mysterious. There’s a subtlety to this concerto, a darkness. Mozart is very physical composer, in a way that’s very different to the big romantic composers. I find that the way you’re able to connect emotionally, even to a passage that’s just a scale, the context of that scale, the underlying pathos and intention of it is always so ... so very, very touching. But, as a pianist, it’s very, very direct, this language.

“I don’t think I play Mozart in a Clara Haskil way, in a way that’s very pristine and very clear. It’s more of a dramatic Mozart, especially in this concerto. I find drama in all of Mozart’s music. Even in the major-key works. That’s how I connect with his music, the underlying humanity, the needs and sadnesses and troubles of his life.”

She elaborates. “When I play this concerto specifically I find the first, maybe four bars of the concerto the most difficult of the whole piece. That opening of the first movement ... I’ve practised it a thousand times, because I’m trying to find exactly the core of it. Because that is the seed for the rest of the piece. I really want to try and tell the whole story in those four bars, pretty much. It’s a concerto I rediscover every single time. But that’s Mozart. That’s the genius of Mozart, as well. There are layer upon layer upon layer in this almost childishly mature simplicity.”

Montero widens her perspective and talks about arriving at the end of your life with “the same or a similar relation to life and to everything that life is” as you had when you were young. “The kind of innocence you have as a child, but having lived through years and years of experience, I think that’s a beautiful closing of a circle, this innocence of the beginning of your life and the end of your life. If you can manage to maintain that innocence and that purity and that sparkle, I think that’s a successful life.

“And, for me, Mozart was able to complete that cycle and that circle. Even though he was only 35 when he died, he writes this concerto always with a tinge of the end of life, but at the same time with a purity. It’s his inner child. It’s always throwing the stone and hiding the hand.”

I live in a time when this happened to my country, to my family, my people, to the place I love and I’m from, that I can’t return to. I felt the need to speak up. It’s as clear as that. You have a choice to stay silent or speak up. I couldn’t look the other way

The cadenzas in 18th-century concertos, where the orchestra goes silent and the focus is solely on the soloist, are a green field for improvisers. At the time the works were written, cadenzas would have been spontaneous displays, although some composers, Mozart among them, began to take control by providing ready-mades.

Montero’s will be impromptu. And this can cause issues with conductors. She can’t give them in rehearsal what she’s going to play on the night. She simply doesn’t know yet what that will be. She works without plans. Filling a pregnant musical silence is something she doesn’t have to think about or prepare for. It happens and that’s it.

Conductors, she explains, ask, “What are you going to do? Can you give me something?” The answer is no. “It’s going to be improvised. But I figured out the only way to calm them down is to say, ‘Look, I’ll give you a two-bar trill. It will be in the right key. You’ll know. I’ll look at you.’ But that’s all they get. It completely freaks some of them out.”

Montero does not find it easy to describe exactly what goes on when she improvises. And the improvisation is also something that her husband was especially curious about. What was the science? What is going on in the brain? Something very interesting, it turned out, after Montero spent time playing a little keyboard in an MRI scanner for Dr Charles Limb at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He scanned her brain to see the differences between playing some Bach that she had memorised, a scale, and an improvisation.

The scanning had to be extended by 90 minutes, because the improvising wasn’t showing up at all. But they eventually located the brain activity. “He explained that I was improvising with my visual cortex, which is much more powerful than the other parts of the brain that are used when playing music. Those parts of the brain that are super active when I play Bach almost shut down and give way to these neural path connections to the visual cortex. I’m not even conscious of it. So it’s not an intellectual process.”

[ Venezuelan voice on his way to the Royal Irish Academy ]

I mention the saxophone-playing improviser Evan Parker, who has explained that if his improvisations were accurately transcribed into musical notation he probably wouldn’t be able to play them. Montero, who also composes, feels similarly and can experience that issue when an improvisation feeds into a composition. “It’s like somebody else has written it,” she says.

She has spent “13 or 14 years which were particularly sad and difficult and heavy” being outspoken about her objections to the political situation in Venezuela. Why get involved in politics? “Because this happened to us. I live in a time when this happened to my country, to my family, my people, to the place I love and I’m from, that I can’t return to. I felt the need to speak up. It’s as clear as that. You have a choice to stay silent or speak up. I couldn’t look the other way.”

The impotence she experienced with so little to show for her protests led her to concentrate on the betterment of individuals. One of the beneficiaries was the tenor Luis Magallanes, whom she managed to get out of Venezuela and in to Ireland. “He was welcomed with open arms in Dublin and was given a two-year scholarship to the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Just the amount of love and support and enthusiasm he received, it was very touching to witness that.”

Gabriela Montero plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K491, with the National Symphony Orchestra under Jaime Martín at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday January 26th. Also in the programme are Irene Buckley’s Stórr and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 (Pathétique)