CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Zankel Hall
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano

BACH Canons Nos. 1 and 2 from The Art of Fugue
ELLIOTT CARTER Two Diversions
BACH "Rectus Inversus" No. 12 from The Art of Fugue
ELLIOTT CARTER Night Fantasies
BACH Canons Nos. 4 and 3 from The Art of Fugue
ELLIOTT CARTER Retrouvailles
ELLIOTT CARTER Matribute
ELLIOTT CARTER 90+
BACH "Rectus Inversus" No. 13 from The Art of Fugue
BACH Fuga a tre soggetti (unfinished) No. 14 from The Art of Fugue
ELLIOTT CARTER Intermittences
ELLIOTT CARTER Caténaires

Program Notes:

Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Carter and Bach: Wine and Bottles Unite

Some music speaks to the heart, while other music speaks to the mind, the lobe that wants to puzzle things out. Some music does both. The music of J. S. Bach did both before people even thought to look at music in this fashion. In tonight’s recital, Pierre Laurent-Aimard aims to prove that the music of American composer Elliott Carter, seen within the context of Bach’s work, is very similar. Carter’s music forces one to think, working on a high intellectual level, but it also remains visceral, using both the brain and the heart to tell a complete—and wholly original—musical story.

Mr. Aimard is known as a staunch champion of the new, or a certain type of new—even if that new is, as Eliott Carter this year, a century old. He was a favorite pianist of György Ligeti, the brilliant Hungarian composer who passed away in 2006, but also has in his repertoire works by Stockhausen, Boulez, George Benjamin, and Messiaen, among others. But this does not prevent him from dazzling interpretations of the standard repertoire, and it would be unwise to typecast him, having recorded a complete cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos as well as music by Schumann (Carter’s other musical ancestor) and, most recently, Bach’s Art of the Fugue.

Tonight’s recital is not just a celebration of Carter or a performance of Bach, but rather a lecture-recital without an actual lecture: Mr. Aimard will explain, through his programming, just how Carter, one of our greatest living composers, while a singular artist, is also the inheritor of a long and important aesthetic lineage. If a famous statement by American composer Charles Ives, an early friend of Carter’s—that the only reaction to a piece of music is another piece of music— holds to be true, then Aimard tonight makes his case for Carter’s keen eye and ear for the great traditions of the past.

One aspect of Bach’s Art of Fugue, a work begun a decade before his death and unfinished, is that there’s an aspect of it that is indeterminate—this is music at its most demonstrably abstract—which will, in the ensuing centuries, become extremely important to composers. In contradistinction to Bach’s Cantatas (all of which were written for whatever instrumentation was on hand) or the Keyboard works (written, in a way, to “audition” a new method of tuning and attendant instruments) these pieces are scored for nothing in particular. This is the first important example of what has been called—in both derogatory and laudatory ways—augenmusik, or “music for the eye,” meaning work that is to be studied as much as (if not more than) it is meant to be heard. So The Art of the Fugue, being not for any instrument in particular, is, in a way, for every instrument, often played by a string quartet, a guitar quartet, a saxophone quartet, an orchestra, an organist (one called Glenn Gould, for example) or, in this case, a lone pianist. Aimard holds that the piece was written for a keyboard (“But which one?” he wonders), certainly proves his point. The work itself remains unfinished, adding to its “open-ended” allure, and the way in which people wrestle this aspect of it (some complete it, others, like Gould, simply stop) is part of the fascination of this ineffable work. No two performances are the same.

In his own way, Aimard will use Bach to make a case for Carter (though the “Dean of American Composers” requires little campaigning). Commencing with the first two canons in The Art of Fugue (a canon being an abstract form wherein melodies chase one another around) as a lead-in to Carter’s 1999 Two Diversions. As with the Bach pieces, all of which grow increasingly more complex, Carter’s small two-movement work moves in a similar fashion though speaking its own musical tongue. “These Two Diversions for piano,” writes the composer, “deal with a growing contrast between simultaneous musical ideas. The first Diversion presents a line of paired notes, musical intervals, that maintain a single speed throughout, while the other very changeable material uses many different speeds and characters. The second Diversion contrasts two musical lines one of which, on the whole, grows slower and slower while the other grows faster and faster.” In other words, the first piece is simpler, the second more involved, much like the two canons.

The next Bach “intro” is the Rectus Inversus, also called a “mirror fugue,” which means that what one line does, the other does the opposite—a complex way of doing musical business. This is one of the most abstruse of entries in The Art of Fugue, the thorniest and most “advanced,” and serves as a perfect prelude to what many think of as Carter’s masterpiece, Night Fantasies, his epic paean to insomnia, and to the monsters that lurk beneath the bed. “Night Fantasies,” writes Carter, “is a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night. The quiet, nocturnal evocation with which it begins and to which it returns occasionally, is suddenly broken by a flighty series of short phrases that emerge and disappear. This episode is followed by many others of contrasting characters and lengths that sometimes break in abruptly and at other, develop smoothly out of what has gone before. The work culminates in a loud periodic repetition of an emphatic chord that, as it dies away, brings the work to its conclusion.”

Canons 3 and 4 from The Art of Fugue aptly introduce the next Carter set. Each of these canons grows more complex and involved, as does this spate of Carter pieces. The first, Retrouvailles, is a short but dense offering, a birthday tribute to his friend and longtime champion Pierre Boulez; Matribute is a gift to James Levine; and 90+ was written to celebrate not his own 90th birthday, but that of his friend composer Goffredo Petrassi. These works are of increasing length—two, four, and six minutes respectively—and while these work on their own, as a set of small but increasingly complex works they follow a progressive certain logic.

Following another of Bach’s Rectus inversus movements comes Intermittences, Carter’s solo-piano meditation on the space between the notes. “The many meanings silences can express in musical discourse,” writes the composer, “challenged me to use some of them in Intermittences. This title was suggested by Intermittences du cśur, one of the chapters in Marcel Proust’s novel. It is a short work that also uses many different piano sounds to convey its expressive meanings.” The final work is to be, appropriately, Caténaires, a piece Mr. Carter composed specifically for the pianist himself. “When Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who performs so eloquently, asked me to write a piece for him,” writes Carter, “I became obsessed with the idea of a fast one-line piece with no chords. It became a continuous chain of notes using different spacings, accents, and colorings, to produce a wide variety of expression.”

—Daniel Felsenfeld

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano
Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and as a leading interpreter of the standard piano repertoire, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career that transcends traditional boundaries.

Mr. Aimard performs throughout the world each season with the major orchestras under conductors including Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, David Robertson, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Franz Welser-Möst. During the 2006–07 season he curated and performed in his own Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, a Carte blanche at the Konzerthaus Vienna, and was pianist-in-residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker. The year 2007 has also featured a ground breaking song and chamber music recital series at the Palais Garnier, Opéra de Paris; and his invitation as artiste étoile at the Lucerne Festival.

This season Mr. Aimard serves as Artistic Director of the Messiaen festival at London’s Southbank Centre and as Artist-in-Residence both for the Mozarteum Salzburg and with The Cleveland Orchestra. In addition, he will curate a Domaine privé at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and he continues as Artistic Partner with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Through professorships in Cologne and Paris, as well as series of concert lectures and workshops worldwide, he sheds an inspiring and very personal light on music from all periods. He was the recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist Award in spring 2005 and was Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year for 2007.

Born in Lyon, France, in 1957, Pierre-Laurent Aimard studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Yvonne Loriod, and in London with Maria Curcio. Early career landmarks included winning first prize in the 1973 Messiaen Competition and being appointed at the age of 19 by Pierre Boulez to become the Ensemble Intercontemporain’s first solo pianist. For more than 15 years Mr. Aimard collaborated closely with György Ligeti, recording his complete works.

In recent years Pierre-Laurent Aimard has been honored with ECHO Classic Awards, both in 2003 for his recording of the complete Beethoven piano concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe led by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and in 2004 for Debussy’s Images and Etudes. Mr. Aimard’s recording of Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and songs with Susan Graham was a Grammy Award winner in 2005. Recent releases include recital discs of Ravel, Carter, and Schumann; his recording of Mozart piano concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which he directed from the keyboard, have been hailed by Die Zeit as “one of the most exquisite Mozart recordings of all time.” In August 2007 Mr. Aimard signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon; his first disc under this agreement, Bach: Art of Fugue, is due for release in spring 2008.