Aimard et al.: Stockhausen, 1 and 2 June 2019

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room

Klaverstücke I-XI; Kontakte

Stimmung

Für kommende Zeiten

Zyklus; Mantra

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Tamara Stefanovich (pianos)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion)

London Voices:

Laura Forbes L’Estrange (sopranos)

Clara Sanabras (mezzo-soprano)

Richard Eteson, Ben Parry (tenors)

Nicholas Garrett (bass)

Ian Dearden (sound projection)

Apartment House:

Simon Limbrick (percussion)

Philip Thomas (piano)
Kerry Yong (piano, keyboard)

Rhodri Davies (harp)

Anton Lukoszevieze (cello)

As Amsterdam celebrated ‘Aus Licht’, not quite the complete Licht premiere we still await, but a generous tasting from all seven operas, those of us unable to attend had to content ourselves with a Stockhausen weekend in London instead. It was certainly an intense couple of days, rewarding too, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard at its heart, just as he had been of the Stockhausen performances at last year’s Musikfest Berlin (three of them reviewed here and here).

I have purposely not re-read what I wrote then, though I shall have a look after posting. The enormity of Aimard’s achievement in the first eleven Klavierstücke, followed here by Kontakte (in a different programme in Berlin), was not diminished by a second hearing, quite the contrary. Indeed, a fundamental theme to everything heard here, in many ways a more diverse offering than in Berlin, was the crucial role played by performance in Stockhausen. Aimard’s ordering remained III, IV, II, I, V, VIII, VII, VI, XI, IX, X. Some people, I know, would have preferred the first four to have been played I-IV, but for me, the order of chronological writing worked well too. The third took its leave from Stockhausen and Webern, but starker, more northern (less Austrian?) Hard on its heels, the fourth initially yielded, almost as if a second subject, but quickly went on its own way: in the same line, yet different. Aimard’s gleaming Yamaha sound seemed ideal for the fusion of musical meaning and serial requirements that lies at the heart of the composer’s art – and thus at the performer’s too; for here was no doubting Aimard’s internalisation of this music, just as there would not be for Beethoven or Messiaen. The second piece sang and struggled, detail of duration and thus of meaning at its heart; the first proved frenetic, especially when not overtly so, in its post-Schoenbergian build-up. Time, then, for a little pause.

There was an intriguingly Boulezian éclat to the opening of the fifth piece, though its development – I think we can call it that, at a pinch – proved once again more overtly Germanic. Much the same might be said of its later chordal progress. The scale was, of course, quite different here from the shorter, earlier pieces; it was made not only to feel so, but necessarily so. An intensely dramatic eighth piece seemed, at least in retrospect, to prepare the way for the artistry with which, in the seventh, repeated pitch was ‘repeated’, or perhaps better, reinstated. (Such was how it felt, anyway.) It was as if this was the moment Stockhausen truly began to itch for the stage, even if it were that of a late Wagnerian ‘invisible theatre’. Aimard’s mastery of resonance already looked forward, fascinatingly, to the second and third concerts of what one would generally, quite rightly, think of as a very different Stockhausen. Then came the sixth, to which, again in retrospect, everything seemed to have been working towards. It sounded generative in a fashion both ‘traditional’ and anything but. How its silences told! How everything else did too, in all its combinations of parameters and their relationships. Monumental was the word for it.

There was opening éclat to the eleventh piece too. By now, there was little way one could not but listen to every note and its relationship to every other – or rather, at least think and feel that was what one was doing. Such was the way Stockhausen and Aimard had led us in. Were those strainings towards electronic sound? Perhaps it was fancy, but is that not too part of musical composition, performance, and listening? Likewise in the ninth piece, albeit in more chordal terms – yet still in terms of something greater. What was ‘old’, what was ‘new’? One asked, even if one could not answer. Finally, we heard the gloved scherzando of Klavierstück X, pyrotechnics and poetry as one: a Feux d’artifice for the atomic age. It was terrifying, thrilling, anything other than consoling. Sheer variety of sound, of voices, of music was very much the thing. And if the final phrase were not quite throwaway Haydn, nor was it quite not that.

For Kontakte, following an interval, Aimard returned (!) with Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) and Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion). Here, virtuosity was returned with interest: à 3, as it were. Theatre was more overt, in every sense, spatial performance and hearing to the fore from the outset. Precision, however, was every bit as crucial, as awe-inspiringly realised, as in the solo piano works. It was interesting to reflect, historically, on how twentieth-century percussion may have paved the way for electronics; such seemed to be part of the ‘moment’ here, at least. At one point, I almost fancied I heard helicopters about to take flight. Structure and its dynamic realisation in time, form, proved dizzyingly circular, yet not quite. This was music-making at its most open, in at least one sense.

Immediately afterwards, we moved from the Queen Elizabeth Hall to the Purcell Room for Stimmung. How one responds to a performance is perhaps an unusually personal thing. I, however, found this London Voices rendition especially involving, the drama heightened, verbal acuity to the fore. There was ritual, yes, but of an approachable kind, perhaps more akin to what we experience in general concert life, less ‘other’. Overtones did their work, but so did words (whatever one thinks of them). There were pros and cons to hearing this after the piano works and Kontakte; for me, on this occasion, the former outweighed the latter.

Likewise, after a good few hours’ break, for the following day’s Für kommende Zeiten. Here, the intuitive music that is not improvisation, the verbal scores that seem both to require reading and performance in just as emphatic a way as the Klavierstücke yet also not to do so, will perhaps always remain a mystery, at least to those of us listening rather than performing. The splendid performers of Apartment House, however, took us on a journey as fascinating, at many times as unexpected, as those to which many of us are more accustomed. We did not hear all seventeen pieces, but seven over about an hour and a quarter, ‘Intervall’, for piano duo (the only piece in which precise instrumentation is specified) proving quite the curtain-raiser, as our blindfolded pianists, Philip Thomas and Kerry Yong, acclimatised and gained their sight, in the process seemingly enabling our hearing to become listening. ‘Verlängerung’, ‘Zugvogel’, ‘Vorahnung’, ‘Japan’, ‘Anhalt’, ‘Spektren’, and ‘Schwingung’ followed. It is doubtless the height of Orientalism to say there were hints of an Orient that seemed to go beyond Orientalism, but such was our illusion.

For the final concert, we returned to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Zyklus and Mantra. Rothbrust treated us to a mesmerising performance of the former, centre stage in every sense. Relationships again manifested themselves not only as points of interest but as the binding material of the music – if not just as in Beethoven, then in a way one might relate to his music, should one wish. Barriers between tuned and untuned percussion seemed to fall by the way. Here was a new orchestra: no gamelan, but Stockhausen’s own, Rothbrust’s own too. Such was the variegation of timbre and its implications, one could imagine never wanting to hear anything else. This was a cycle that was both just that and so much more.

Aimard returned for Mantra, with Stroppa and Tamara Stefanovich. I found myself making comparisons with Boulez’s second book of Structures, which I had heard – and seen – Aimard and Stefanovich perform in this same hall in 2011. Not that the works have very much in common; it was as much a visual-dramatic way in, and very soon more a contrast than a comparison. Two pianos, two pianists, then, played with bells, became bells and their masters. What was the relationship between acoustic and electronic, between work and performance, between instrument(s) and their performers? Such questions, such contests and collaborations, were part of the drama, but so too was an almost conventional battle royal heard at one point, Stockhausen’s often overlooked (German) sense of humour certainly given a fair hearing in this case. His music proved as obstinate as Beethoven and as strange to us as – well, life on Sirius. Aimard and Stefanovich afforded us as strong a sense of the whole as they might have done in Bach or Brahms; within that framework, there were in equal measure to be heard, felt, even thought, great subtlety and starkness. There was ritual, of course, but again not of an especially esoteric kind. There was no doubting either the composer’s voice or that of his performers. The sense of aftershock following the pianists’ howling proved almost Mahlerian. What did it mean? Who knows? Perhaps the question is as irrelevant as Stravinsky would have us believe, or as the ritual of later Stockhausen works such as Inori might suggest. The ensuing two-piano-plus toccata proved at least as mesmerising as Zyklus; and likewise changed the face of all that came thereafter. Form manifested itself in work, performance, and listening – even if, sometimes especially if, one could not put a name to it. There are, after all, many such mysteries in our world and beyond.

Musikfest Berlin (4) and (5) - Aimard et al.: Stockhausen, 15 and 17 September 2018

Grosser Sendesaal des rbb and Kammermusiksaal

Telemusik (1966)
Refrain (1959)
Zyklus (1959)
Kontakte (1958-60)

Mantra (1970)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano, celesta)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Benjamin Kobler (piano)

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Marco Stroppa (electronics)

 

For two further concerts of music by Stockhausen we moved to the splendid Westend concert hall in Hans Poelzig’s Haus des Rundfunks for a varied programme of electronic and ensemble music, before returning to the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal for Mantra. (Alas, I had to hurry back to London for a meeting and thus missed the final event, a performance of Inori.)

The purely electronic Telemusik opened the first concert. If I say that it sounds more than ever a work of its time, I do not mean that in a disparaging sense; it does not only sound as such. But there is something engagingly remote – just as there will be for Mozart – as well as close to us in hearing such a work; it is now, as indeed one might say of any of these works, a classic. The lights went off. A projected sun appeared above the stage. Who knows which? Our own, under which the languages and cultures of the world make hay before the end of days? Sirius? Some other? A generic light, even? We seemed to hear its rays, their light, their refraction, even perhaps reflection (in whatever sense you care). Songs of the world, of some other world, were heard, sung, chanted, reinvented. A world of music(s) was ours and yet was not; it was now of the past, almost as if we had visited it, as Stockhausen once had visited us. And with that, we made our own synthesis – even in, perhaps particularly in a work without visible ‘performance’. Make of that what you will; that, perhaps, is the point.

Refrain, for three performers (Benjamin Kobler on piano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard on celesta, and Dirk Rothbrust on percussion), came next. If Telemusik offered ritual of a sort both old and new, so too did this. I could not help but wonder whether Boulez had occasionally had it in mind as a precursor to his orchestral Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. It was mesmerising to watch as well as to listen to; the distinction seemed perhaps unusually false. Serialist theatre, in which freedom and organisation were revealed as two sides of the same coin, revealed silence also to be as crucial as it would be to Bruckner (that despite the giggles of two audience members next to me). Those strange cries of – to? – another world seemed already to look forward to Mantra and the Inori I was fated not to hear.

What an array of instruments one sees and hears in Zyklus, for solo percussionist. I say that not simply, or even principally, in terms of quantity; anyone, given a budget, can offer a large number of instruments. But here the arrangement, the interrelationship, the unity in diversity and vice versa again suggested a form of serialist music theatre for all the senses. Rothbrust’s virtuosity was astounding, but it rightly never came across as mere virtuosity; this was a performance, an act of formal revelation. Variety of attack and reverberation struck as the work of a piano writ large: again, surely implications or at least parallels for later works by both Stockhausen and Boulez. Bells seemed to recall in context both previous works on the programme. Aimard and Kobler both crept into the hall to listen, their collegiality richly rewarded indeed.

After the interval, Aimard, Rothbrust, and Marco Stroppa (electronics) gave us another fine performance: this time of Kontakte. A spatial element always seems to bring out something very special in Stockhausen – and so it was here. So too does theatre, of whatever kind, the piece initiated by Aimard’s rising to sound – not necessarily in the way the innocent eye and ear might expect – the gong: a moment and sound with clear implications for what was to come. Electronic sounds enhanced, responded, developed, just as any other chamber music response, if we may call it that, would. Rothbrust and Stroppa reminded us that percussion and electronics the growth sections of twentieth-century music, perhaps not only Western art music. If anything, they – and Stockhausen – helped here to revive the fortunes of the piano. Not, of course, that an artists such as Aimard needs any such help, nor is his part restricted to the piano. His part at times seemed to take off where the clusters of the tenth Klavierstück had left off. What virtuosity there was to be heard here, both solo and ensemble: this was, as so often with Stockhausen, music both as we knew it and as we did not.

Transformation – to be traced back, if we wish, through Schoenberg and Liszt to Bach – was very much a key to that work’s unendliche Melodie, to borrow not entirely inappropriately from Wagner. So too it was for Mantra, at the Kammermusiksaal, in which Aimard and Stroppa were joined by Tamara Stefanovich. Stockhausen was quite clear that the unfolding of this work was not to be understood as variation form, whatever it might seem to have in common with such writing – and performance. For there is no variation as such, although there is much expansion and contraction: perhaps not unlike another star or how we see, feel, and think about it. So it was here, a fine, crucial line trod with care, understanding, and the keenest sense of drama. That drama here, as elsewhere, was architectonic, just as the architecture was dramatic. It was at times absurd: absurd in its seriousness and absurd in its child-like absurdity. These were players, these were outstanding performances in which we knew we were in the safest as well as the most thrilling of hands. We could therefore surrender to the telling of a story just as much as to the progression of a ritual. The more we listened, the more we watched too, the more we heard and experienced. Form – its importance can hardly be exaggerated here, both in itself and for so much later music – was once again revealed in and through performance. One marvelled in what Stockhausen elicited, what he re-invented, but above all in what he said, in what he sang. A staccato sounded, perhaps even signified as if it had never done so before, so too a tremolo, so even did an arpeggio. If Schoenberg had felt the air of another planet, perhaps this was indeed the sound of something that lay yet further beyond.

Aimard - Anderson, Benjamin, Ligeti, Kurtág, Stroppa, Carter, and Messiaen, 26 October 2017

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.

 

Kairos Quartet/Experimental Studio des SWR: Haas, Stroppa, and Rusconi, 7 April 2013

Hall Two, Kings Place

Georg Friedrich Haas – String Quartet no.4 (2003)

Marco Stroppa – Spirali per quartetto d’archi ‘proiettato’ nello spazio (1987-88)
Roberto David Rusconi – String Quartet no.4, De imago (Materia) Sonora (2012, world premiere)

 

Wolfgang Bender, Stefan Haussler (violins)
Simone Heiligendorff (viola)
Claudius von Wrochem (cello)
Thomas Hummel, Simon Spillner (sound projection)

 

I wanted to enjoy this concert, but ultimately found that expectations exceeded reality. It is perfectly likely, of course, that I simply did not properly understand or even appreciate the works performed, all of which I was encountering for the first time. It is even possible that they may have been left down in performance, though I doubt it; insofar as I could ascertain, the players of the Kairos Quartet and the Südwestfunk Experimental Studio offered committed advocacy. Yet, on a first hearing, I cannot say that I was entirely convinced by two out of the three pieces for string quartet and electronics.

 

Georg Friedrich Haas’s Fourth String Quartet was, according to the programme, his first work to employ electronics; I had a slight sense that it might have been out of duty rather than powerful inclination; indeed, there seemed to be something rather dated about the practice, which though ‘live’, had an air of early, 1950s tape experiments rather than the first decade of the twenty-first century. Much of the first half of the work was a story of gradual transformation, though the pace of that transformation picked up somewhat with time. A surprisingly lyrical section, initiated by viola, offered some respite from what was beginning to sound merely grey. (Try to imagine electronic, microtonal Hindemith Gebrauchsmusik.) Sections were clearly demarcated and, at least in retrospect, the work’s architecture was readily discernible, but drama tended to come from the ‘effect’ of the electronics rather than anything more intrinsic to the material. Or perhaps I was just missing the point.

 

Marco Stroppa’s Spirali plays, as its title suggests, with spirals in spatial form, as realised by electronics. It seemed to me a far more interesting work. Electronics sounded more integral to the experience, and from the very outset; the material itself, apparently derived from a latent chorale, also seemed to be of greater interest. There was certainly a greater sense of drama and of the material being in flux. One could even experience intensity simply from watching the sound engineers, let alone from hearing. The ‘involved’ quality of the music at some points, even if only coincidentally, might have been glancing back to Schoenberg’s quartet writing. There were, then, complexity, expressiveness, and complexity in and of expression, aided and furthered by ‘voices’ emanating from electronics. The magical conclusion might almost have been said to have possessed an air of spectralism.

 

Roberto David Rusconi’s De imago (Materia) Sonora also made fuller use of electronics, indeed arguably more so still, and again from the outset. Rusconi’s work, receiving its first performance, gave a strong sense of ‘landscape’, not necessarily as opposed to a journey through time, though not necessarily unopposed to it either. As with Haas’s work, however, the quartet as a whole sounded very sectional. Though full of incident, it was unclear to me quite how it all added up. Perhaps, however, I was again merely missing the point.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard: Liszt, Bartók, Stroppa, Ravel, and Messiaen, 8 November 2011

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Liszt – Années de pèlerinage, Book III, S 163: ‘Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este: Thrénodie (I)’
Bartók – Four Dirges, op.9: no.4, ‘Nénie’
Liszt – Légende no.1, S 275/1: ‘St François d’Assise’
Stroppa – Miniature estrose: ‘Tangata manu’
Liszt – Années de pèlerinage, Book III, S 163: ‘Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este’
Ravel – Jeux d’eau
Messiaen – Catalogue d’oiseaux: ‘Le Traquet stapazin’
Liszt - Années de pèlerinage, Book I, S 160: ‘Vallée d’Obermann’


Just the sort of treatment Liszt needs: a thoughtful, fascinating programme, performed by a pianist who is first and foremost a musician, Pierre-Laurent Aimard. To see so many empty seats in the Queen Elizabeth Hall was saddening, whether for Liszt’s or Aimard’s sake; doubtless the Royal Festival Hall would have been full to the rafters for the likes of Lang Lang. Aimard’s recital was as far removed from such a travelling circus as one could imagine: works by Liszt combined with a fascinating range of related twentieth-century works. Crucially, Aimard performed the entire recital without an interval, and without applause. Would that other pianists might follow suit, where appropriate.

There was, thankfully, nothing remotely flashy about Aimard’s pianism. (Has there ever been?) Yet that does not imply a technique that is anything other than astounding. It is, however, harnessed to musical rather than to merely virtuosic results. As Liszt himself realised, to defeat mere virtuosi, one needs to have super-virtuosic means at one’s disposal. The control with which Aimard, for instance, shaped the climaxes of ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ provided a masterclass in both technical and musical senses. The B minor Sonata sounded, rightly, just around the corner. So, incidentally, in the introduction did Eugene Onegin: not the only time Tchaikovsky seems to have cribbed from Liszt. (Compare their respective first piano concertos, though not in form.)

The third book of the Années de pèlerinage had provided two items earlier on, the opening ‘Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este: Thrénodie (I)’ and ‘Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este’. The former emerged as finely poised as I have heard between the grand and lyrical Romantic manner of Liszt’s maturity and the dark intimations of old age. The way in which the latter gradually won out, though never entirely, over the former was a tribute both to the pianist’s – as well as the composer’s – technical and intellectual means and to the vividness of his pianist imagination. The fourth of Bartók’s Four Dirges, ‘Nénie’, followed on, as if a supplement penned by Liszt himself. Harmony and voice sounded almost as one: a revelatory choice of programming. If only we could have heard all four.

‘Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este’ and Ravel’s Jeux d’eau may have been a more obvious coupling, but here, Aimard’s twist was as much to highlight distinction as much as undeniable debt. (When Ravel was asked how his work should be performed, he responded, ‘like Liszt, of course'.) Through the brilliant evocation of fountains and their games, we realised that for Ravel, they were just that: games, albeit of surpassing elegance. Liszt, however, invested a sense of the divine into a typically awestruck depiction of Nature. As the composer, acknowledged in his quotation from St John, ‘But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.’ If Messiaen’s ‘Le Traquet stapazin’ from Catalogue d’oiseaux owes something to the writing of Ravel and Debussy, in its spirituality it has much more in common with Liszt. As one might expect, Aimard’s account was nothing less than magnificent: fully idiomatic in tone, tempo, and overall conception, as commanding of silence as of intervallic relationships, and seemingly at one with the composer’s spirit.

It was only really in the Légende, ‘St François d’Assise’, that I harboured any doubts – and it would be astonishing in such a recital if some works did not come off better than others. The tempo seemed a little laboured, which is not to say that it necessarily was in objective terms, but rather that Lisztian fantasy did not quite take flight. Even here, there were compensations, in hearing a great deal more than one often does of the relationship between the notes, but the poetic ‘idea’ was not quite fully voiced. The piece made an excellent introduction, however, to Marco Stroppa’s 1995 ‘Tangata manu’, from his Miniature estrose, a work which not only in its piano writing but also in its subject matter, the divine hunt for the egg of a sea swallow, connected so many concerns of Liszt, Ravel, and Messiaen. The treble register of Aimard’s Yamaha proved as equal to the challenge as the pianist’s mind and fingers.

More is to come on 7 December. There is also a recording, which I have not yet heard, featuring repertoire from both recitals. I fully intend to investigate.