Pierre
Boulez Saal
Julian
Anderson: Sensation (2015-16): ‘Toucher’
George
Benjamin: Shadowlines: ‘Tempestoso’ and ‘Very freely’ (2001)Ligeti: Études: ‘Der Zauberlehrling’ and ‘Entrelacs’ (1994, 1993)
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Passio sine nomine’ (2015)
Marco Stroppa: Miniatura estrose (1991-2001): ‘Passacaglia canonical in contrappunto policromatico’
Carter: Caténaires (2006)
Messiaen: Catalogue d’oiseaux: ‘La Rousserolle effarvatte’ (1958)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
If it would be an exaggeration
to describe this as a recital of music that ‘belonged’ to Pierre-Laurent Aimard
– music, surely, belongs to us all – then it would be a pardonable
exaggeration, whose purpose and meaning were clear. Here were pieces, mostly
drawn from larger works or collections, with which Aimard has a particular
connection, and with which he could – and did – speak not only with great
authority but with eminently thoughtful musicality. Nothing was taken for
granted; indeed, the music spoke both with the freshness of the new and the
understanding of a grounded repertoire.
I wish I could feel the
enthusiasm so many friends, colleagues, fellow musicians and music-lovers
clearly feel for the music of Julian Anderson. That includes, clearly, Aimard,
who gave the premiere of Sensation at
Aldeburgh last year, and here extracted from it, in what he believed to be its
German premiere, the second movement, ‘Toucher’. I have never actively disliked
any of Anderson’s music, but rarely have I discerned much beneath an often
attractive surface. Perhaps that is the point; I am not so sure. At any rate,
this piece, conceived, in Anderson’s words, ‘with particular emphasis on the
French tradition of the jeu perlé –
playing of great lightness, speed and clarity – of which Pierre-Laurent Aimard …
is such a brilliant exponent,’ made for an impressive pianistic opening. It sounded
as if conceived more or less in a single, dare I say melodic, line, with
certain additions or elucidations, often chordal, around it. The chords
certainly sounded very ‘French’, Messiaen in particular coming to mind in some
of the harmonies.
George Benjamin’s Shadowlines, from which we heard here
the fourth and fifth movements, followed: another work of which Aimard had
given the first performance. This emerged very much as a re-examination, more
to my taste, even perhaps to my understanding, of canonical procedures, thereby
offering our ears and minds as much vertically as horizontally. It seemed, in
performance as well as in the work ‘itself’, that not only had polyphony been
reinstated, but so too had its typical dialectic between freedom and
organisation. Or perhaps that is just someone speaking who has been spending
too much time with Schoenberg recently. At any rate, the piano writing (and
playing) had an intriguing sense of the Germanic too it as well: far from
exclusive, or even predominant, but unmistakeable, at least to these ears.
Aimard clearly relished its complexities; so too did I.
Aimard’s collaboration with
Ligeti verges upon the ‘legendary’: (not, of course, in the sense that it did
not happen!) Aimard gave the premieres of many of the composer’s later piano
works, these two Études included.
What immediately struck me, both in no.10, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, and
no.12, ‘Entrelacs’, was the ‘finish’ to what we heard, again both as work and
as performance. This, one felt, was a mastery, compositional and performative,
worthy of, say, Ravel. If the first offered something of a connection to the Anderson
piece, its emphasis perhaps in a broad sense ‘melodic’, the metrical
transformations and layering of ‘Entrelacs’ seemed both to speak of kinship
with and difference from Elliott Carter (still to come). The energy was
impossible to resist – and why on earth would one try?
I suspect that, by now, you can
guess who gave the 2015 first performance of Kurtág’s ‘Passio sine nomine’,
from his compendious Játékok. He
seemed to do it proud again here in Berlin. I was especially struck by a
certain obstinacy, an almost religious truculence – although was that a thought
elicited by the title? – a Credio quia
absurdum, both to the material and to the performance. All that Bach the
Kurtágs have played sounded with something I am tempted to call immanence.
Aimard gave the premiere of Marco
Stroppa’s Miniature estrose in 1995;
a second premiere, of the completed version, was given by Florian Hölscher in
2000. Here, Aimard’s performance of the ‘Passacaglia canonical in contrappunto
policocromatico’ seemed very much to make use of the Pierre Boulez Saal –
there, of course, is another composer to whom Aimard could hardly have stood
closer! – as an instrument in itself. (How very different it must have sounded
in that premiere at the Opéra Bastille!) The almost whispered intimacies and
indeed the entire dynamic range sounded very much a product of the hall as well
as of the keyboard. So too did their interaction with other parameters, and with
other, more malleable aspects of the music. The sheer beauty of work and
performance shone through.
Ever youthful, the work of
Carter ended the first ‘half’; here we heard the composer at 102. In Caténaires, we heard once again
consummate mastery. I thought of Ligeti’s ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, and
perceived – if sometimes only just – a penumbra of polyphonic possibilities
surrounding what is, for Carter, as Aimard explained, an unusually
un-polyphonic work. The composer indeed spoke of having ‘become obsessed with
the idea of a fast one-line piece with no chords’. Was it perverse for me to
have heard it that way? Perhaps, but nevertheless I did. Truly, though, its
energy sounded as music for the age of computers, even of the Internet.
Aimard did not, of course, give
the first performance of Messiaen’s Catalogue
d’oiseaux; Yvonne Loriod did, in one of Boulez’s Domaine musical concerts. His association with all concerned,
however, is strong and deep, and so it sounded here. Aimard’s recording of the
complete work will be released next year. This performance of the vast ‘La
Rousserolle effarvatte’ (‘The Reed Warbler’), at about half an hour, offered
quite the calling card. More than that, it seemed, whether this were the
illusion of performance and programming or something more, to unite and indeed
to develop many of the tendencies we had heard earlier, whilst remaining of
course very much itself. No one else could have written this music! The
opening, as much for the different sonorities heard simultaneously as for their
pitches, sounded as if performed with three hands. Admittedly, I could not see
the keyboard, but I am reasonably sure that it was not. Through the violent
eruptions, the silences (what silences!), the different colours (whether one
actually ‘sees’ them or no), the luscious harmonies, the obstinate rhythms, the
undeniable religious mysticism, and of course the birdsong, both a singularity
of voice and a multiplicity of voices seemed to assert themselves – and to
express a joy in being, in music-making that penetrated to the essence of
Messiaen’s art. Everything sounded refracted through, not just related to but
derived from, everything else. Perhaps ‘total serialism’ had not passed after
all; it had simply, or not so simply, reinvented itself.
