The astounding French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard spent the first part of his adventurous career in the front lines of the musical avant-garde as a mainstay of Pierre Boulez’s contemporary-music ensemble in Paris. In the last decade, though, he has branched out, revealing himself to be an elegant and exciting performer of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Ravel.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard at his lecture-recital at Zankel Hall.
On Sunday night at Zankel Hall, as part of his Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall this season, another dimension of this essential 49-year-old artist emerged: inspired teacher. Mr. Aimard presented a program of nearly three hours titled “A Promenade in 88 Keys and 300 Years.” His subject was the evolution of musical styles during three centuries of piano music, and the shifts in attitudes among composers toward the piano itself. To make his points in this provocative and continually surprising lecture, Mr. Aimard played more than 30 musical examples, both short pieces and excerpts of longer ones, everything from Scarlatti to Scriabin to Stockhausen.
That this cultured Frenchman spoke in heavily accented English and sometimes, searching for the right phrase, invented words (like Bartok’s “giving freedom to these resourcements of energies”) made his comments all the more delightful. Mr. Aimard proved a most mischievous professor. Rather than delineate the individual achievements of the Viennese Classical masters, he assembled an amalgam to make a three-movement Viennese Classical sonata. A humorous presto from Haydn’s Sonata No. 40 in G was conscripted as a first movement (even though it is actually a finale, but “that doesn’t matter,” Mr. Aimard said). As a slow movement he offered the pensive Adagio from the Sonata No. 17 by Mozart, with its “perfect sense of proportion, balance, harmony and space.” And the bustling first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7 in D, music that for all its impishness conveys a stunning mastery of construction, was the finale of this mix-and-match piece.
Mr. Aimard had a rather Boulezian take on the history of piano music. His ear was drawn especially to the uses of color and texture, and he leapt on every bit of evidence that composers like Liszt and Brahms were already pushing the boundaries of tonality. His analysis of the way Ravel created misty waves of shimmering sound in “Ondine” by building harmonies and melodic lines from the upper notes in the overtone series was a revelation.
The entire second half of the program was devoted to 20th-century music. Among the highlights were a wonderfully clattering account of Stravinsky’s Piano-Rag Music, which Mr. Aimard described as the composer’s radical cut-and-paste reassembling of a ragtime piano piece, and scintillating performances of works by Messiaen, Ligeti and Elliott Carter.
Introducing “Guero” (1970) by Helmut Lachenmann, Mr. Aimard explained that the pianist is supposed to perform the piece mostly by scraping his fingernails along the edges of the keys to evoke the sounds of an African instrument that is played by scratching a stick along the ribbed side of a woodblock. Instead, to protect his fingers, and with deep apologies to this “very left wing” German composer, Mr. Aimard played the piece using two of his thoroughly capitalist credit cards.
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