I wish I’d been there… He is an amazing musicia-n. Any Julliard students out there in 88-land boot it ?? // /// // /// // /// -sousa
from the NY Times
December 13, 2006
Music Review | ‘Pierre-Laurent Aimard’
Night of Études: Debussy, Chopin and (Surprise!) Elliott Carter
By ALLAN KOZINN
One thing Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s piano recital on Monday evening at Zankel Hall demonstrated was that a carefully planned, illuminating program can be a work of art, but that remaining open to the moment is even more important. Mr. Aimard’s program, part of his Perspectives series, was meant to be an exploration of the étude and its dual mission of building finger power and capturing the imagination.
His idea was to play 24 of them, and the sequence assembled was, mathematically and thematically, a thing of beauty and simplicity. In the first half he offered six pairs, with études by Debussy, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Messiaen, each set beside one by Gyorgy Ligeti (who died in June) that explored similar ground. After the intermission he was to play three études each by four composers, Bartok, Debussy, Scriabin and Ligeti.
But a few days ago a new work by Elliott Carter, “Caténaires,†had arrived in the mail, and because Mr. Aimard’s concert was on Mr. Carter’s 98th birthday — and because Mr. Carter had said he wanted to hear the piece soon, instead of waiting for the occasion it was written for (his 100th birthday, in 2008) — Mr. Aimard opened the second half of his program with it, wrecking his symmetry, perhaps, but gaining the excitement of a surprise premiere.
As it turned out, Mr. Carter’s work suited the program perfectly and seemed to pack the spirit of several other works on the program into a concise four minutes. Like the first of Bartok’s Three Studies (Op. 18) and the last of the Scriabin Études (Op. 65), “Caténaires†is an insistent, rich-textured, unabashedly virtuosic roller coaster of a piece. But it also had moves in common — a rumbling bass opening and sparkling treble writing — with Messiaen’s “Île de Feu I,†from the “Quatre Études de Rythme.â€
And while it may seem perverse to liken Mr. Carter’s music to Rachmaninoff’s, there were points of contact with the Étude-Tableau in E flat minor (Op. 33, No. 5), which Mr. Aimard played earlier in the evening. Romanticism appears to have replaced spiky angularity here, as it has in other recent scores by Mr. Carter.
When Mr. Aimard finished playing the work, he jumped off the stage, walked up the aisle to Mr. Carter’s seat and applauded him for a few minutes. Then he played the work again. Curiously, where his first performance had been steely and bright, the repeat had a softer edge and a warmer tone.
The points Mr. Aimard had intended to make were by no means lost in the reconfiguration. In the first pairing Debussy’s Étude No. 1, with its simple opening and its animated, elaboration, moved easily into Ligeti’s equally tactile, gamelan-tinged Étude No. 7. In a mirror image of that set, Chopin’s reflective F minor Étude (Op. Posth., No. 1) was linked with Ligeti’s transparent, lightly dissonant Étude No. 11. And Liszt’s Étude No. 5, with its hunting horn calls, borrowed from a Paganini Caprice, finds its modern echo in compressed fanfares of Ligeti’s Étude No. 4.
The second part of the program did not depend on connections, but Mr. Aimard is an uncommonly thoughtful interpreter and a brilliant technician, and his lively, dramatically characterized readings carried the works on their own terms, or at any rate on terms it would be nice to think are theirs.
As part of his Perspectives series, Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs in chamber concerts at Zankel Hall on March 29 and May 10; as the soloist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on March 30; and in recitals at Zankel Hall on April 1 and May 11. (212) 247-7800.