The producer gives us the fly-on-the-wall details of one of the most remarkable recording sessions for piano ever.
Suvi Raj Grubb: When I started to get interested in music it took some time for me to come to terms with the piano. But by the time I joined EMI (now Warner Classics) I loved piano music and was very knowledgeable about it, so whenever a new pianist appeared I was first choice as producer.

By 1966 I had made a clutch of piano records, one of the best of
which never saw the light of day. When Martha Argerich walked into the studio it was her dark, smouldering looks which first struck me. As soon as she arrived she asked for coffee; when I offered her a cup she gulped it down in one go and asked for more. I sat her in the studio with a large pot of coffee and went into the control room.

At first, her hands moved casually over the keyboard as she tested the piano. Then she launched into Chopin’s Polonaise Op.53. I sat
up in my chair with a long drawn out ‘Jee-sus’ – the balance engineer said ‘Wow!’

If this was a sample of her playing, Argerich was quite the most formidable player we had ever come across. The big chords sounded huge, the runs between them clean; in the trio, a great showpiece, the difficult left-hand octave runs were even and the crescendo controlled. I peeped into the studio to make sure that this wash of sound was really originating from the slip of a girl seated at the piano. It was quite unbelievable.

I smiled as I recollected Clara Schumann’s remark to Brahms about the Paganini Variations, regretting that it was beyond a woman pianist’s capability. Nothing would have been beyond this woman.

She came into the control room, looked at me and beamed, for she knew she had had a shattering impact on me. Over the next few days, fortified by gallons of strong, black coffee, she finished a Chopin recital which included the third Sonata, the third Scherzo and, fashioned like miniature jewels, a group of Mazurkas and Nocturnes. The last movement of the Sonata is in one flawless take. She said she had enjoyed the sessions; she liked the sound of the piano on the record, and looked forward to working with me again.

To my bitter disappointment, we learnt a few weeks later that her commitment to another company would not permit us to publish the record, and, not for the first time nor the last, I wished that there were no such things as exclusivity clauses. In due course a record with the same repertoire was released by our rivals – when I heard it I knew that our Argerich was the better of the two.