Acclaimed French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard gave the last (and most ambitious) of three recitals at the Queen’s Hall celebrating the life, work and influence of the legendary Alfred Brendel – who was a regular at the Edinburgh International Festival for many decades, following his debut in 1970.
Following on from concerts by Steven Osborne (Schubert and Judith Weir) and Paul Lewis (Mozart, Schubert and Chopin), Aimard showcased a series of 48 miniatures. The first half elided and contrasted Beethoven Bagatelles with the experimental work of Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006), specifically Musica ricerata (‘Searching music’) written between 1951 and 1953.
What a brilliant piece of programming this proved to be. If you expected nothing more than a chaotic collision of styles, you would have been quite mistaken. In the Bagatelles, Beethoven is at his most humorous and light-hearted (though no less demanding) musical self. Ligeti, on the other hand, is playing with tonality, texture, harmony and rhythm in very different styles, but equally entertainingly.
The result is a dance of deliciously thwarted expectations across 21 interweaved pieces, most lasting a little under or a little over a minute or two, but packed full of invention and ideas. At the time he wrote Musica ricerata, Ligeti was facing Stalinist artistic suppression, but he refused to be daunted or dissuaded. So these micro-compositions are testimony to persistence as well as restless experimentation.
Sound wise, they are also surprisingly accessible to modern audiences inclined to be nervous about the ‘contemporary classical’ or ‘new music’ labels. Indeed, it is extraordinary to hear these unplanned anticipations of minimalism, post-minimalism, math rock and Gothicism arriving in a concert hall from over 70 years ago!
As for the Beethoven connection, there are two. First, Ligeti extracted six of the eleven movements from Musica ricerataand and arranged them for wind quintet. He titled this standalone suite ‘Six Bagatelles’, and clearly had the German maestro in his side vision. Second, in his final Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Beethoven featured as the third of a set of variations on an Arietta theme in the second movement a swinging, syncopated compound rhythm with driving, insistent accents.
Listeners and musicologists alike cannot resist seeing this as unavoidably close to what we now call boogie-woogie. Beethoven would surely have loved Ligeti as much as Ligeti admired the German master’s architectural brilliance and inventiveness. This is just the sort of adventurism that Brendel, as a pianist thoroughly rooted in the classical and Romantic repertoire, kept an ear open towards, Pierre-Laurent Aimard pointed out in a brief introduction to the second half of the concert, which interspersed Franz Schubert’s miniature dances alongside a selection of the gnomic, contemporary utterances from György Kurtág’s Játékok ‘Games’.
Once again, the connections (aurally and conceptually) continually surprised. Kurtág, now in his centenary year, has been writing these “pedagogical performance pieces” since 1973. Perhaps a little more chewy than the Ligeti, Játékok aims to combine the spontaneity of a child exploring the piano with the compositional resources of an adventurous, avant-garde musical mind. Again, this was a fine pairing with Schubert’s energising but subtle dances. Kurtág has long admired the Austrian composer, transcribing some of his work and dedicating a homage to him.
Overall, this a joyous morning-into-lunchtime concert. Aimard is dedicated both to promoting contemporary music and showing its connections and contrasts with deep tradition. His ability to shift rapidly between wildly differing styles and demands was a masterclass, well received by pleasingly full hall, given the nature of the concert.
This was EIF at its best, but I do wish this could have been programmed in a way to reach more younger ears. Quite apart from the famous use of his Atmosphères in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, Ligeti in particular has the capacity to speak into the current cultural mix with arresting conviction.
If you are still intrigued, this performance will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as part of an Edinburgh International Festival series.
Simon Barrow writes regularly for the Edinburgh Music Review: https://tinyurl.com/SimonBarrowEMR
His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes
