Since winning the Olivier Messiaen Competition in 1973 and then becoming a founding member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Pierre Boulez, French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard has been a champion of contemporary music. As he showed yet again in a Monday evening recital at La Maison Française, it is not just that he plays contemporary music in all styles but also that he plays it so well, so musically, with such understanding. Aimard’s recording of the Ives Concord Sonata, for example, lays bare the structure and sense of one of the most complex pieces of the 20th century. Aimard does more than champion: his playing of contemporary music can proselytize.
This was at least part of the goal of this kaleidoscopic and enigmatic recital, a selection of 40-some short pieces and excerpts of longer pieces, played without intermission. With microphone in hand, Aimard guided us through the five sets he had constructed, in a collage-montage, a “game” to bring together different pieces. With masterful technique and a sure-footed sense of musical shape, Aimard gave life to this mosaic composed of vastly different colors.
The first section, Prélude Elémentaire, dealt with the basics of sound, opening with pieces by Ligeti and Bartók that developed extensively through repetitions of a single note. This blossomed into a pair of pieces, by Schoenberg and Bartók, based on thirds, and finally into pieces by Webern and Boulez in the 12-tone style. A “slow movement” that explored the extremes of expressivity and ambiguity called Sostenuto followed, with highlights including a Scriabin prelude, the Janáček Intermezzo erotico, and especially Marco Stroppa’s Ninna-nanna from Miniature Estrose (1991-95), a work based on tremulo figures and Doppler effects. In that setting, the 20th variation of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations almost sounded atonal.
This was the stunning effect of Aimard’s juxtaposition of atonal and tonal selections, so that the end of one dovetailed perfectly with the next, often pivoting on the same note or chord. This was most striking in the third section, Intermezzo zodiacal, where Romantic sublimations of country dances like the Ländler, mostly by Schubert, alternated with movements from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zodiac. (Was it a coincidence that this suite of pairings ended with the Virgo movements, which happens to be Aimard’s astrological sign?) No matter how far toward the fluffy Romantic stereotype the selection went, even Liadov’s A Musical Snuffbox and an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, the pattern made Stockhausen seem only a step away.
Photo of Pierre-Laurent Aimard by Guy Vivien
