Kammermusiksaal
 |
| Images: © Adam Janisch |
Stockhausen:
Klavierstücke III, IV, II, I, V, VIII, VII, VI, XI, IX,
X
Pierre Laurent-Aimard (piano)
I have no doubt that memories
of hearing Pierre–Laurent Aimard play the first eleven Stockhausen Klavierstücke will remain with me forever:
like hearing Maurizio
Pollini in Chopin or Daniel
Barenboim in Beethoven. Not so much a performance of the year as of a
lifetime, this recital proved just as all-encompassing and arguably still more
necessary. Certainly no one present would have been left doubting or denying, in
what would have been his ninetieth-birthday-year, Stockhausen’s demand to be
heard alongside those and other past masters.
First came the first four, in
the order III, IV, II, and I: almost, but not quite the order of composition
(III, II, IV, I). The third is not only the shortest of the Klavierstücke but the shortest of all
Stockhausen’s compositions. We hear – chez
Aimard, we certainly heard – not only Webern enthroned but Webern
instrumentalised: the Webern of that celebrated ‘productive misunderstanding’,
conscious or otherwise, of what we still just about cling to as an idea of ‘Darmstadt’
or ‘the post-war avant garde’. What I heard immediately was a tone, a general
approach to performance I recognised from having Aimard’s Art of Fugue ten years ago. Then
I mused that he had, to my fascination if not always to my (irrelevant) liking,
been playing Bach through the ears of Darmstadt; this seemed to confirm that.
(I should now very much like to hear his Art
of Fugue again.)
The fourth Klaverstück sounded both similarly and as a response. Already my
ears – and, I am sure, the ears of the audience more generally – were adjusting,
hearing by virtue of Aimard’s outstanding performance the relationship between
all musical parameters not only set before us but dramatised. This Stockhausen
was an heir to many, but was without doubt a Teutonic heir to the Messiaen of the
second of the Quatre études de rhythme, ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’: that
extraordinary, in many ways quite atypical (for the composer), first essay in ‘total
serialism’. Any lingering Romantic doubts would instantly have been silenced. Can,
for instance, dynamic contrast be ‘expressive’ if it is non-negotiable? Of
course: all we need do is listen. Stockhausen’s music revealed itself – or rather,
was revealed by Aimard – as sonorous architecture in time just as much as Beethoven’s.
Building of voices in the
second Klavierstück seemed again to
have some points of correspondence with a Bach fugue: only superficially,
though, for this was no one other than Stockhausen. And yet, the sense of
variables as heard in ‘traditional’, earlier music continued to grow in Aimard’s
performance of the first: interacting, converging, just as they would in Bach
or Beethoven, alongside a ‘new’ understanding of them, perhaps long since
forgotten, as musical ‘parameters’. Its emphatic final note, sustained,
reverberating seemed to ask: is this a climax, a reconciliation, something new?
Perhaps more important, it also seemed to ask whether such questions, such
Romantic remnants retained any meaning.
Number five came fifth. In Aimard’s
hands, it opened as if a ‘Jimbo’s Lullaby’ for the fifties, albeit with none of
Debussy’s equally challenging vagueness. Such precise, magical variation in
reverberation was not the least ‘expressive’ device to be heard here.
Intervallic listening – a remnant of Webern? – will perhaps always throw up
some oddities; a leaning upward minor sixth suddenly suggested to me the
opening of Tristan. But that is
hardly an issue unique to this music; and, in any case, why not? Furthermore,
one is not listening to such intervals in isolation. Context is crucial,
however ‘context’ may be considered. The eighth proved jaw-droppingly different
in character, the contrast between what I heard as metre and its bending
suggestive of a reinvention of rubato,
both ironic and utterly sincere, unquestionably hard-won.
The seventh sounded with
particular force as a response to other music: both heard here and elsewhere,
perhaps even Boulez’s Second Sonata. The opening repetitions of C-sharp, always
with different resonance, offered somehow a focus on something both
comprehensible and incomprehensible. (Is that not the case with any music worth
our time?) No one listening to Aimard’s performance could doubt the
constructivism at work here that seemed somehow to blossom into something
strangely akin to a reinvention of the sonata principle. Perhaps not entirely
coincidentally, I started to hear intimations
of Liszt. The first half closed with the sixth Klavierstück, which struck, at least to my ears, a note of defiant
struggle, both traditional, even Romantic, and not. By now, the piano was
sounding more and more as an instrument reinvented, our very experiences and
ideas of sound and listening having been transformed. Somewhere, perhaps, in
this aural penumbra were the seeds of Stockhausen’s more overt later mysticism.
And yet, this remained music as generative, as dialectical as Beethoven. Intensity
of work and performance alike had become close to unbearable; time, then, for a
drink.
The second half opened with the
eleventh Klavierstück. Rightly or
wrongly, I very much felt here that typical ‘after the interval’
reinvigoration. These things matter, however much Stockhausen may (justly) have
disdained our traditional concert-going practices. It was certainly not a
negative thing: pitches, intervals sounded renewed in themselves rather than
hermeneutically. Did the hoary Romantic idea of ‘absolute music’ have life in
it yet? There were flashes of a not un-Boulezian frenzy and fury to be heard, though
the architecture could hardly have been more different. I started to think of
material, even poetic contrasts between swirling, serial constellations in the
sky and something more traditionally, even harmonically grounded. Rotation was
the thing here, I think, although I could not explain why. Poetic control, a
related idea, was the one that came to me in the ninth. It was evocative – but surely
of ‘itself’. What a sense of drama it nevertheless possessed. Not the first but
certainly the most grievous of the evening’s telephonic interventions blighted
a good few of the closing seconds.
For the tenth and final piece, Aimard
put on his fingerless gloves. He and Stockhausen taught us once again, even
more thoroughly than before, to re-listen – even before the truly shocking physical,
musical drama of those celebrated cluster glissandos. It was not so much
difficult to credit that there were only two hands – two arms, really – playing
as difficult not to credit that there were not twenty. Two ears certainly
seemed insufficient to listen with; alas, that was all I had. Radical hardly
seemed the word; again, it was all I had. Something quite extraordinary
happened during the piece’s course: through the swirling cauldron contents of
cluster reverberation, a world was put (back) together. Order out of chaos?
Once again, this music, these performances reached back to Bach and beyond, and
forward to Stockhausen’s own Licht
dramas. As I said, the performance of a lifetime.
