A brilliant musician and an extraordinary visionary, as the Wall Street Journal calls him, Pierre-Laurent Aimard is widely acclaimed as an authority in music of our time while recognised also for shedding fresh light on music of the past. His international schedule of creatively conceived concerts, broadcasts and recordings is complemented by a career-long commitment to teaching, giving concert lectures and workshops worldwide. Aimard is the recipient of many prizes, receiving the prestigious International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2017 in recognition of a life devoted to the service of music and the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, Denmark’s most prominent music award in 2022.
Johannes Brahms:
Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118: Nos. 1, 2, 4
Robert Schumann:
Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133
Arnold Schönberg:
Zwei Klavierstücke, Op. 33a & 33b
Alexander Scriabin:
Piano Sonata No. 9, Op. 68, ''Black Mass Sonata''
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Olivier Messiaen:
Catalogue d'oiseaux, I/42: No. 3
Le merle bleu (The Blue Rock Thrush)
Maurice Ravel:
Le Tombeau de Couperin, M68
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Johannes Brahms (Hamburg, 1833 – Vienna, 1897) was a Romantic ‘classicist’, an alleged conservative regarded as a great innovator by Arnold Schönberg. He was one of the composers who developed the classical-Romantic instrumental music to its tonal heights. He firmly adhered to form and absolute music, but his techniques and structures exceeded the requirements of the genre, merging the art of music construction with emotion, the classicist compositional logic with the poetics of romanticism. He also developed many music forms that his ‘rival’ Wagner had already loudly dismissed. Brahms’s music as it is known today is most likely only a third of his total output, since he often destroyed the works he did not consider good enough, especially those written in his youth. In addition to four symphonies, Violin Concerto, A German Requiem, nearly 200 art songs, he also left an extensive and significant chamber opus and a number of piano pieces.
Brahms composed Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118, during the summer of 1893 in Bad Ischl. The first piece, Intermezzo in A minor, marked Allegro non Assai, is dramatic and seems to pass in a breath. Its ending announces the following Intermezzo in A major (Andante teneramente), probably one of Brahms’s most performed works. With its contrasting atmosphere, more restrained and romantic, it fuelled speculation that it was ‘a love letter’ to Clara Schumann. The fourth piece, also an Intermezzo, in F minor (Allegretto un poco agitato), is restrained with restless outer parts.
Musicologist Julius Philipp Spitta described Op. 118 as ‘perfect pieces to be slowly assimilated in peace and solitude’ and ‘exceptionally diverse piano cycle’, while Clara Schumann, to whom they were dedicated, said that the miniatures contained ‘a wealth of feeling within the narrowest confines.’
Robert Schumann (Zwickau, 1810 – Endenich, 1856) allegedly decided to quit law school and become a piano virtuoso after hearing Paganini play in Frankfurt in 1830. His ambition was hindered by the problems with his hands, possibly caused by a device he invented to improve his piano practice, or perhaps by medical treatment. In 1840 he married his piano teacher Friedrich Wieck’s daughter, Clara, despite Wieck’s strong opposition and attempt to prevent the marriage in court. Clara was a pianist and composer who strongly influenced Schumann (and later Brahms). As a composer, he often confined himself to a single form for a long period of time: piano works in his early years, then Lieder, followed by symphonic music and eventually chamber works. His compositions are often marked by ‘gentle unrest’ created by combining lyrical themes with dense counterpoint. He also founded an influential periodical, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. His later years were marked by long periods when he was not composing due to frequent depressive episodes.
The five short pieces from Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn) cycle are some of Schumann’s final works, the last whose publication he oversaw. The subtitle of the composition was supposed to be ‘For Diotima’, after the heroine of the novel Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin, who drew inspiration for his novel and poems about Diotima from Plato’s Symposium. The short pieces are devoid of elaborate ornaments or demands for virtuosity and, as the title suggests, inspired by various types of vocal music: chorales, hunting songs, art songs with accompaniment. Clara Schumann later described them as ‘completely original pieces, but difficult to grasp’. They are dedicated to the writer Bettina von Arnim.
Only a few days before his suicide attempt, Schumann wrote to his publisher Friedrich Arnold that his new work ‘depicts sensations we feel at the approach of morning, more through the expression of feeling than painting’ (Beethoven described his Pastoral Symphony in similar words, ‘more the expression of feeling than painting’).
Arnold Schönberg (Vienna, 1874 – Los Angeles, 1951) worked most of his life in Vienna and Berlin, and spent the last two decades in the United States. Although he was mostly self-taught as a composer, he was the most influential teacher of his time, with Alban Berg and Anton Webern among his earliest and most important students, who continued to enjoy his support after completing their education and comprised the famous Second Viennese School with Schönberg. Schönberg’s work can be divided into three periods; in the first, he relied on late Romanticism, especially on the work of Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms, expanding tonality to its limits. In the second period, Schönberg’s expressionist phase, he abandoned tonality in his works (Three Piano Pieces, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Five Pieces for Orchestra, Erwartung, Pierrot lunaire), while his third period was marked by the invention and use of the twelve-tone technique, with the occasional return to earlier procedures and tonality. At the same time relying on tradition, logic and innovation, as the leader of the Second Viennese School, he laid the foundations for the development of the so-called New Music and had a significant impact on the 20th-century music.
Arnold Schönberg wrote Two Piano Pieces, Op. 33, after Emil Hertzka from the Universal Edition publishing house asked him for permission to include his earlier works for piano in an anthology of piano music. Schönberg decided to write new pieces instead, in which he applied the twelve-tone technique, now with more possibilities of combination because he was able to use two forms of a twelve-tone row simultaneously (the tones from an individual row are not repeated until the row ends). He wrote the first piece in 1929, and the second in 1931, in Barcelona. The Arnold Schönberg Centre points out that the first piece is impulsive, the second more restrained, and both are Schönberg’s condensed version of the sonata form, revealing that he drew inspiration from Brahms’s Intermezzi. They conclude: ‘His final compositions for solo piano demonstrate his endeavours to fit new musical ideas into traditional contexts.’
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Moscow, 1872 – 1915) wrote mostly orchestral and piano music. He used innovative harmonic procedures and specific chromatic shifts, crossing the boundary of tonality, to an extent, in his later composing. He also used his own chord system, where he attached esoteric meaning to individual chords, such as the so-called mystic chord. He was interested in the synesthetic nature of art and had very specific demands regarding the lighting at his concerts. Scriabin performed throughout Europe, and from 1897 taught at the Moscow Conservatory. At the beginning of the new century, he increasingly turned to mysticism and theosophy, dedicating himself to creating art that would open up ‘new spiritual horizons’.
Scriabin nicknamed his Piano Sonata No. 7 ‘The White Mass’, but was not responsible for naming this evening’s Piano Sonata No. 9 ‘The Black Mass’. Its title was the invention of the pianist and theosophist Alexei Podgayetsky, and Scriabin apparently liked it. He stated that in this dramatic piece he had come closer to the ‘Satanic’ than ever before, and described its parts as ‘poisonous’, ‘mysterious’ and ‘a parade of the forces of evil’. It inspired Arthur E. Hull to coin the term ‘molecular vertigo’.
Olivier Messiaen (O. Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen; Avignon, 1908 – Paris, 1992) began composing at the age of eight and entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eleven, winning five Conservatoire’s first prizes, in counterpoint, accompaniment, organ playing and improvisation, history of music and composition. He served as the principal organist at Sainte-Trinité in Paris for over forty years. After the Second World War and imprisonment in the German concentration camp in Görlitz (Zgorzelec) – where he composed his famous Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) – he taught at the Paris Conservatoire and held classes for Boulez and other young composers.
Several non-musical themes play an important role in Messiaen’s music: Catholicism (especially in his organ and choral works), the theme of love (Harawi, Turangalîla-Symphonie) and his interest in nature, particularly birds, whose singing he attempted to notate and used in his composing. He studied the music of India and other non-Western cultures, as well as rhythm in early music. He composed using ‘additive’ rhythmic patterns (disrupting the regular rhythm within a measure), polyrhythmic textures, and modes of limited transposition.
Messiaen developed interest in birds with his friend, amateur ornithologist Jacques Delamain. For Reveil d'oiseaux, for piano and orchestra, he transcribed songs of 38 different French birds, and of 48 for Oiseaux exotiques. His most important work inspired by birds is the extensive Catalogue d'oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds) from 1958, consisting of 13 sections. Each is devoted to a principal bird, but there are 77 different species of birds in the music altogether. He dedicated it to the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who would later become his wife.
Messiaen added descriptions to the score, and for Le merle bleu / Monticola solitarius (The Blue Rock Thrush) he mentions, among other things, ‘June on the Vermilion Coast’, ‘cliffs above the sea’ and blue rock thrush song ‘echoing in a rocky cleft’. ‘Its blue is in contrast to the sea,’ he continues, ‘almost oriental, recalling music of Bali, its song merges with the sound of the waves.’ Other birds are heard, writes Messiaen, and in the end the memory of the blue rock thrush remains, ‘like a choir of women’s voices in the distance.’
The term Tombeau (French: ‘grave’, ‘tomb’) refers to an instrumental work – a lament – written to commemorate a deceased person. It was introduced to French music from literature, where it referred to short poems about deceased dignitaries, common in France in the 16th and 17th centuries, and later also to commemorative music. In the twentieth century, French composers revived this tradition, including Maurice Ravel, who wrote Tombeau de Couperin in 1914-17. Another example is Tombeau de Debussy from1920, written by Dukas, Stravinsky, Ravel, Satie, Bartók and other composers.
Maurice Ravel (Ciboure, 1875 – Paris, 1937) studied composition under Gabriel Fauré, to whom he dedicated some of his works. In addition to classical composers, he was influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov, Javanese gamelan music and contemporary composers. He composed numerous pieces for piano and various chamber ensembles, two piano concertos (one for the left hand only) and orchestral works. Due to his exceptional attentiveness to details while composing (and as an allusion to Ravel’s father’s Swiss origin; his mother was Basque), Stravinsky once referred to him as the ‘Swiss watchmaker’.
Ravel intended to write a series of piano pieces as a tombeau for the composer François Couperin (1668 – 1733), known as Couperin le Grand (the Great), the founder of the French harpsichord school, but his plans were disrupted by the First World War. Ravel was physically unfit for the army, but in 1915 he enlisted as a driver and served until he fell ill. After returning from the military hospital in 1917, he continued working on his unfinished piece, dedicating each of the six movements to one of his friends who had died in the war. The widow of one of them, Marguerite Long, premiered the piano suite Tombeau de Couperin in 1919. The same year, Ravel orchestrated and reworked four movements. He dedicated the dreamy Prelude to Jacques Charlot, the cheerful Forlane (Venetian dance) to Gabriel Deluc, the solemnly melancholic Minuet to Jean Dreyfus, and the lively Provencal Rigaudon to brothers Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, who were killed on their first day on the front line.
Musicologist Gerard McBurney wrote that Ravel had written the piece focusing on what is opposite of war, the things we want to preserve from its influence. Some critics complained that Tombeau's music was not sombre enough for a war theme, to which Ravel replied: ‘The dead are sad enough in their eternal silence.’
“A brilliant musician and an extraordinary visionary” (Wall Street Journal), Pierre-Laurent Aimard is widely acclaimed as an authority in music of our time while recognised also for shedding fresh light on music of the past. His international schedule of creatively conceived concerts, broadcasts and recordings is complemented by a career-long commitment to teaching, giving concert lectures and workshops worldwide.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard has had close collaborations with many leading composers including Helmut Lachenmann, Elliott Carter, Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marco Stroppa, Pierre Boulez, and Olivier Messiaen. During the 2023/24 season he celebrates the music of György Ligeti with projects throughout Europe, North America, Japan and China. Guest concerto appearances include Czech Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden, Teatro alla Scala Milan, Orchestre National de France, Danish National Symphony Orchestra and New York Philharmonic. Aimard’s extensive recital touring takes in Southbank Centre London, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Musikverein Wien, Philharmonie Luxembourg and Concertgebouw as well as Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco. At Paris’ Theatre des Champs Elysees he collaborates with French actor Denis Podalydès for an exploration of Fateless with music by Ligeti, Kurtag, Schoenberg and Cage. Aimard also continues his association with long-standing chamber music partners, most notably Tamara Stefanovich at the Tonhalle Zürich and Madrid’s Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical, and jazz pianist Michael Wollny at Frankfurt Alte Oper.
Upcoming world premieres include Clara Iannotta’s Piano Concerto for the Acht Brücken Festival in Cologne and the Portuguese premiere of Klaus Ospald’s Se da contra las piedras la libertad, a work co-commissioned by Casa da Musica, Porto and Cologne’s WDR Symphony Orchestra. Past premieres by Aimard include Carter’s last piece Epigrams; Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s works Responses; Sweet disorder and the carefully careless and Keyboard Engine for two pianos.
The season began with the September release of a new recording of the complete Bartók piano concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. This record is the latest in a series of critically acclaimed collaborations with Pentatone, following Visions de l’Amen (2022) recorded with Tamara Stefanovich; Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata & Eroica Variations (2021), and Messiaen’s magnum opus Catalogue d’oiseaux (2018) which garnered multiple awards including the prestigious German Music Critics Award.
An innovative curator and uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age, Aimard has been invited to direct and perform in numerous residencies including recently for Musikkollegium Winterthur where over the season he celebrated different composers and opened with the complete cycle of Beethoven Piano Concertos. Elsewhere, he has performed ground-breaking projects at Porto’s Casa da Musica, New York's Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Konzerthaus Vienna, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Lucerne Festival, Mozarteum Salzburg, Cité de la Musique in Paris, Tanglewood Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, and as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 2009 to 2016.
Aimard is the recipient of many prizes, receiving the prestigious International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2017 in recognition of a life devoted to the service of music and the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, Denmark’s most prominent music award in 2022. A member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Aimard has held professorships at the Hochschule Köln and was previously an Associate Professor at the College de France, Paris. In spring 2020, he re-launched a major online resource Explore the Score in collaboration with the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, which centres on the performance and teaching of Ligeti’s piano music.
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Photo (c) Marc Borggreve
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