Pierre-Laurent Aimard

 Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 21/8/24

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano.

This was the second of two recitals given by ground-breaking Danish pianist and teacher Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Edinburgh International Festival, following on from his appearance at the Salzburg Festival earlier in August. With the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern immediately following, he is clearly a musician in demand. From this performance, it is not hard to see why.

 Aimard has become rightly renowned as an interpreter and advocate of the music of our own times, and of the twentieth century. But he also understands the long classical traditional well and seeks to present concerts which the blend the two in interesting ways. That was the case with this Queen’s Hall appearance, where a homage to Schoenberg was interspersed with studies from Brahms, Schumann and Scriabin, plus an intervention from late Webern.

 Absorbing opening performances of the Brahms Intermezzos in A minor and A Major (part of his ‘Six Pieces for Piano’, Op. 118, dedicated to Clara Schumann) brought out their reflectiveness, settling the audience in the rich tonality of the Romantic era. Schoenberg admired these works, and his two short Piano Pieces Op. 33a and 33b, which followed, display a unity of style which owes something to them, though they are composed in the quite different sound world of combined twelve-tone rows.

 Aimard knows this music intimately. It has a singing quality which he highlighted beautifully. At times it seems to echo back to Brahms, while clearly intending to forge forward. The programming of this concert was very carefully crafted in that respect, continuing with Schumann’s five-part Gesänge der Frühe (‘Songs of the Morning’), Op. 133. These were written when he was quite ill, three years from death, and have a brooding undertow as well as an obvious beauty.

 Clara Schumann wrote in her private diary that her husband’s piano songs are “very original as always, but hard to understand, their tone is so very strange.” Perhaps some people still have that attitude to Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces Op. 23, which appeared in 1923. Each explores a varied, sophisticated approach to serializing pitch. But they also require some of the same piano techniques as the Schumann.

 The original programme specified the Webern Variations for Piano Op. 27 as occurring before the interval, but Aimard (who also asked the audience to withhold applause until the end of each half, so that the connections between the otherwise contrasting pieces could be more readily sensed) wisely repositioned them after the break.

 The three movement Variations (1936) are Webern’s only published work for solo piano, issued in a definitive version as late as 1979. Associates of Schoenberg regarded them as akin to a sonatina, and their particular feature, again drawing on twelve-time procedure, is their forward and reverse symmetry, including what could be termed musical palindromes. Aimard was well on top of the trickery, while bringing out their lyrical quality and dramatic ending.

 Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19 followed, demonstrating a concentration of form which is used to explore the shape and style of music outside tonality. There is supposed to be a numerical reference to Mahler’s funeral among their many little gestures, which Aimard handled with dance-like phrasing. Again proceeding without a break, he then launched directly into Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9 Op. 68 (1912-1913).

 Sometimes known as the ‘Black Mass Sonata’, this is a tonal but highly chromatic work based around an interval of a minor ninth, which gives it a slightly disconcerting feel. In another brilliant programming choice, this was immediately followed by the concluding Schoenberg Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 (1909), combining classical structure with free atonality, rather than strict serialism. They are full of repeated pulses, dramatic pauses and melodic inferences.

 Scriabin and Schoenberg produced these works within three years of one another. They adopt quite distinct approaches, yet the feeling and impact is not as dramatically different as one might suppose. So while serialism, atonality and other elements of twentieth-century modernism are often viewed very much in terms of their break with the past, there is often more connectivity than meets an ear predisposed towards alterity or threat.

 Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s wide-ranging musical gifts, expressed through his superlative playing and programming, show that the windows of appreciation can indeed be kept open across received boundaries, allowing the musical breeze to blow back and forth creatively.

 Photo: https://pierrelaurentaimard.com