This is Pierre-Laurent Aimard on György Ligeti’s Piano Concerto:
“Throughout this work, a matchless imagination is channeled into a style of writing that places huge demands on its players. To perform it requires insane gestuality and virtuosity and an unbridled imagination, but it also demands a constant concern for a sense of balance, together with great respect for the work’s polyphonic textures and an acute sense of rhythmic and formal integration. And all this must be combined with the most relaxed flexibility, the most unbearable dramatic tension and the most caustic conceivable humor.
The finest of all contemporary piano concertos invites its performer to rise to the extreme challenge of the piece—a challenge entirely typical of Ligeti—and to combine a total delight in playing with perfect control and sheer madness.”
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Aimard was in town this week, kicking off his “Perspectives” series at Carnegie Hall. He is one of the most important classical pianists in the world. On Sunday afternoon at Stern Hall, he played the Ligeti concerto with the Chicago Symphony. I know this piece pretty well, but hadn’t seen a live performance of the complete work until now. It was unexpectedly dramatic when the harmonica or the slide whistle came out. Pierre Boulez was icy and reliable, ensuring that the piano and percussion were beautifully together.
Details of the concerto were inevitably lost in the cavernous acoustic. Béla Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin was more appropriate for Stern, with the famous Chicago brass filling the hall. I confess I didn't like the program's opener, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales. Ravel is a brilliant master who I have a serious blind spot about, and in that work his finale offers a résumé of the previous half-dozen pieces. I don’t like this effect even for the few bars that Brahms does it in his Third Symphony; a whole movement of Ravel doing it is torture.
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The next night I attended Aimard's recital at Zankel, where he played most of the Ligeti etudes along with etudes by other composers. In the first half, there were pairings of Ligeti with Liszt, Chopin, Messiaen, Rachmaninoff, and Debussy. In the second half, there were the three Bartók etudes Op. 18, the three Scriabin etudes op. 65, and three more each of Debussy and Ligeti. Few other pianists could have pulled this pulverizing program off. (Maybe Marc-Andre Hamelin or Fredrik Ullén could have done it.) It was a truly awesome display of piano power. My only complaint--and this is like complaining about spots on the sun--is that the Paganini-Liszt etude "La Chasse" sounded a little prim. Liszt's music is usually pretty bad, but a great pianist can make him the supreme guilty pleasure. Aimard was a little too busy that night for the gun-slinging carelessness needed for the rather banal "La Chasse." The Ligeti pairing, "Fanfares," had much more abandon.
It was my first time seeing the Bartók piano etudes live. Opus 18 is easily Bartók's finest solo piano work, and Aimard played the wonderful third movement better than any recording I have heard. They are excruciatingly difficult (the first movement in particular, where the barbaro figuration lays just outside of a hand's reach at all times), but certainly not any harder than most of the Ligeti etudes, which ironically seem to have entered the repertoire more than Opus 18 at this point.
I was there with Steve Smith, whose own blog entry is where to read of the fabulous surprise of Aimard's recital, the première of Carter's most charismatic solo piano piece since his Piano Sonata from the 1940's. The fact that Aimard, in the same week that he was playing the Ligeti concerto and 24 finger busters, could learn a four-minute Elliot Carter toccata means that Aimard isn't kidding when he talks of combining "a total delight in playing with perfect control and sheer madness."
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For my final night on 57th street, I went back to Zankel to see Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra with Sarah. My favorite harpsichord recordings are by Koopman, who makes familiar Bach pieces like the Goldberg Variations or the Inventions shockingly new with the addition of an incredible amount of ornamentation and a strange, loping "early music" kind of rhythm. The program was the Musical Offering and the "Coffee" Cantata. Sure enough, Koopman started the night with some really strange ornamentation in his presentation of the theme in the Offering's 3-voice Ricercare. I cannot imagine another musician treating a tune that is going to be the basis of 40 minutes of music so casually, but Koopman has no fear. He is an adorable stage presence, a little man with white hair bobbing his head rhythmically and lustily thumping away at a harpsichord emblazoned in Latin:
Dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano.
(While I lived I kept silent; in death I sing sweetly.)
The printed program was ordered incorrectly, leading to a certain amount of audience confusion. As people got up for intermission I knew that they hadn't played the 6-voice Ricercare--the one that Charles Rosen calls the greatest fugue ever written--and whispered to my wife, "Ton forgot to play the big fugue! How could he have done that?" …no, wait, here they came again. The fugue was originally printed in open score, implying a performance of either six instruments or keyboard, and I had never heard the six instruments version live. It was the highlight of the evening.
The Musical Offering, the Goldberg Variations, and the Art of Fugue are mono-themed works from the end of Bach's life. Together they offer the most rigorous use of mathematics in music before 20th-century serialism. I learned about Musical Offering in high school from Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll), and hearing those strange-loop and crab canons last night made me want to read that marvelous book again.
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Wiki:
Musical Offering
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The Art of Fugue
