Grey skies the perfect backdrop for this Venezuelan’s prodigious talents.

Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
May 3, 2015

Gabriela Montero is not your common or garden concert pianist. At every performance she gives the Los Angeles-based Venezuelan mother of two gets the audience to sing a tune – it might be something as banal as Colonel Bogey or Three Blind Mice – then she’ll play around with it, enter ‘‘a white void’’ and turn it into a polonaise worthy of Chopin or a chorale by Bach. Now 45 and exiled from her corrupt homeland with its dizzying murder rate, she has been doing it since she was a child and it is a special talent that many classical musicians would give their eyeteeth to have.

The art was lost somewhere in the late-19th century; before then pianist-composers like Mozart and Beethoven were expected to extemporise. Now, with the borders between the various musical genres being rapidly broken down, Montero belongs to the new echelon of performers who are liberating themselves from the constrictions imposed by previous generations. Sydney audiences were first introduced to her prodigious talents as an improviser and orthodox performer in 2008 when she played Grieg’s concerto with...