Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y.; October 20, 2005
When witnessing pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s myriad musical qualities in action, the most striking is remarkable for its absence: the stamp of the pianist himself. Aimard’s playing, while replete with confidence and finesse, manages always to serve the music rather than the ego. His daring rubato in the first of four Debussy preludes that opened his recent program, “Danseuses de Delphes,” cast this gem in a stark, altogether un-“impressionistic” light. The pianist achieved a startling range of expressive tones in “Le Vent dans la plaine” and added new color to “Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir.” In “La Danse de Puck,” Aimard brought crystalline clarity to the whirling (Shakespearian?) rhythms, invoking his own mastery of Ligeti, who has called Aimard “the leading performer of contemporary piano music.”
Aimard substantiated this designation when he unraveled the thorny, intertwined lines of Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 1. Even those concertgoers who believe Boulez should be seen but not heard must have taken some delight at hearing emancipated inner voices sparkling in pointillistic tranquility. Closing the first half, Aimard lent Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit a dramatic orchestral srength, without feeling the need to display brute force, even in fortissimo passagework.
In the second half, Aimard turned the homogenous vignettes of Schumann’s Carnaval into his own Pictures at an Exhibition, so vivid were his interpretations. As an encore, he wished Mr. Boulez a happy birthday and whipped off his old mentor’s Notation No. 4 as though he were playing a Bach minuet. He tempered this detonation with a beloved Debussy Prelude, “La fille au cheveux de lin,” played with such warm pianissimo that some of us were able to recall the flaxen hair of la fille in question.
Ben Finane
