Alemania
Musikfest 2: The Seekers
Jesse Simon
Over the past decade Pierre-Laurent Aimard
has been a regular guest at Berlin’s Musikfest, and his concerts have tended
either towards single works (or bodies of work by a single composer) of great
scope and complexity – from Book One of Das wohltemperierte Klavier to
Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke – or towards fascinating juxtapositions (for
instance, the pairing of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier with Lachenmann’s Serynade).
While the technical assurance of his playing is beyond reproach, it is the intelligence
and discernment of his programmes that have been instrumental in helping to
fashion a new canon of core repertoire for the twenty-first century, one in
which Messiaen and Boulez can sit comfortably next to Chopin and Liszt.
One of Mr Aimard’s programmes for this
year’s Musikfest offered the intriguing coupling of Schönberg’s complete works
for solo piano and Ives’ monumental Concord
Sonata. Although the evening’s works all dated from the first decades of
the twentieth century, it would be difficult to imagine a contrast greater than
that between Schönberg, the educator and theorist struggling to redefine music
for the modern age, and Ives, the career insurance-man creating poetic
evocations of Concord, Massachusetts in relative obscurity. Yet the evening’s
two halves formed a complementary whole: in both Schönberg’s Central Europe and
Ives’ New England one could hear the piano straining to liberate itself from
the formal constraints of classical tradition.
Schönberg’s works for solo piano – twenty-one
pieces spread out over five collections – fit comfortably onto two sides of a
single LP, but their relative brevity is offset by a disproportionate density
of musical thought; indeed as the pieces get shorter – many of the Six
Pieces op. 19 are over in under a minute – they seem only to grow more
concentrated. The Three Pieces op. 11, which opened the programme, were
perhaps the most outwardly conventional in form and content: in a few passages
one could even hear faint traces of Zemlinsky’s gloomy opulence, albeit
tempered by abrupt flights to the extremes of the keyboard. The second of the
three pieces, an extended study in uncertain mood underpinned by an insistent
two note figure, was given an especially expressive performance: although Mr
Aimard maintained a deliberate pace he was able to find subtle drama in the work’s
internal dissension.
If the Three Pieces offered a
glimpse of one of Schönberg’s roads-not-taken, the Six Little Pieces op.
19 and the Five Pieces op. 23 were the works in which the struggle to
break free from the past was most apparent. Mr Aimard approached the Six
Little Pieces with an intensely inward focus that made their brevity all
the more cryptic; in the Five Pieces, Mr Aimard was able to bring out
all the exquisite detail and rhythmic vigour while, in the concluding waltz,
even hinting at a touch of humour; and the two piano pieces op. 33a and b were
played with a refined articulation that offset their unexpected rhythmic twists
and occasional flirtations with chaos. However the cumulative effect of op. 19,
op. 23 and op. 33 was that of feeling one’s way through the darkness without
the reassurance of anything familiar.
The Suite
for Piano op. 25, which ended the programme’s first half, was all the more
surprising for its sudden, jarring clarity. Although the movements are named
for the familiar dances that one might find in any number of baroque suites,
the music remains resolutely its own: but where the evening’s earlier pieces
seemed born of a dedicated search, the Suite was the sound of arrival.
Everything in Mr Aimard’s performance was fully locked in: from the wild energy
of the Praeludium (in which hints of Mr Aimard’s preeminence as a Messiaen
interpreter could be detected) to the exuberant motivation of the Gavotte, to
the surprising directness of the Menuett/Trio, this was a performance in which
Schönberg’s theoretical advances were reconciled to a more outward mode of
expression.
Mr Aimard has long been a champion of Ives’
second Piano Sonata, both on disc – his 2004 recording is still one of
the best – and in the concert hall; and while the work is notorious for
its extreme technical demands, Mr Aimard’s performances are notable for their
ability to find the elegant simplicity behind the work’s occasionally
forbidding flurry of notes. Certainly the piece offered an ideal counterbalance
to the rigorous concentration of the first half: the opening movement sounded
almost sprawling after Schönberg’s compact structures, and its easy flow seemed
wholly untroubled by the problems of form. Yet there was no doubt that Ives,
with his wide-ranging inspiration and casual flouting of orthodoxy, was
searching for his own path towards a kind of musical freedom.
While the sonata employs a familiar four
movement structure – each movement is named for an artist or intellectual who
gravitated towards the town of Concord, Massachusetts during the mid-nineteenth
century – the music within sets itself subtly apart from convention. (With
customary disregard for standard practice, Ives also included small parts for
viola and flute in the outer movements, although these were not performed on
this evening). The first and longest movement, named for Ralph Waldo Emerson,
features passages in which the bar lines disappear, but Mr Aimard’s ability to
separate musical events from textural embellishment gave even its knottiest
passages a refreshing spaciousness, while his unfailing – but never overstated
– sense of the movement’s pulse allowed its episodes to unfold with
remarkable unity of purpose.
In the second movement, named for Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Mr Aimard’s two hands were augmented by a block of wood, covered on
one side in felt, which allowed him to play large clusters that even a forearm
might not have covered. Although Mr Aimard was somewhat restrained in the
sudden jazzy interlude, his level-headed handling of the movement’s frenzied
conclusion was unquestionably the evening’s most dazzling display of
virtuosity. The third movement – The Alcotts – moved gracefully from
idyllic to heroic, but it was the final movement (Thoreau) that stood as the
summit of both the sonata and the evening: for its duration, Mr Aimard
maintained a mood of astonishing reverence and even in the busiest sections
there was an underlying serenity that conveyed the awe of Thoreau – and perhaps
Ives himself – in the face of the natural world.
Mr Aimard returned for a rare encore, one
of the Jazz Studies by Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer whose works form
a prominent part of this year’s Musikfest programme. Ligeti, as Mr Aimard
informed us in his brief introduction, had apparently been a fan, and one could
hear why: the brief piece was as inventive, propulsive and delightfully
brilliant as any of the entries in Ligeti’s three magnificent books of Études.
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