http://www.youtube.com/v/ffesxg5K5NQThis Waldstein from 1970 shows quite a lot about Argerich's art at its worst.
It's really exciting in the first movement -- but so what? Her Waldstein is just that -- a cheap thrill. She's got very little to say with the music -- it's not quite typing but not far off. She's fast. The articulation is clean, somewhere between staccato and legato. There are one or two seconds of unusual balances. But that's not enough to make this music into anything interesting.
Admittedly this is a hard movement to make interesting (it's a bit repetitive!) But there are some fantastic performances on record -- she's just not up to it. She's not wayward enough in fact -- she's too firmly on the rails. I kept imagining what Ernst Levy or Claudio Arrau must have thought if they had heard her play it.
Don't get me wrong -- I like some of the recordings: the Bach Toccata and Partita, the Chopin mazurkas and sonata released last year by DG (historic material previously in the archives), the Brahms duet with Zilberstein, The Mendelssohn 1st trio.
But mostly she's not a favourite.