EIF: Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 26/8/26
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
The forenoon of 26th August brought French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard to the Queen’s Hall, in the third Brendel tribute recital at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, playing a programme curated to honour the late Alfred Brendel, his close professional partner and friend, through the medium of no fewer than 48 piano miniatures. Two classical composers closely associated with Alfred Brendel’s most celebrated work, Beethoven and Schubert, were represented, the former through a selection of his Bagatelles from the Op.33 and Op.119 sets, the latter through a selection of his many dances, including waltzes and Ländler. I might add that my own introduction to Schubert’s Impromptus (in particular) was through Brendel’s 1970s recordings of them and, to this day, those performances remain my unsurpassed gold standard. Two modern avant-garde composers whom Brendel admired, both Hungarian and both named György, Ligeti and Kurtág, were represented through all 11 pieces in the former’s ‘Musica ricercata’ and a selection of the two-hand pieces in latter’s many-volumed collection of miniatures, ‘Játékok’ (Games). Attendance was satisfactory.
The first half of the concert was devoted to the 11 Ligeti pieces in numerical order (the number of pitch classes permitted in each piece is greater than the previous, so the order is important), interleaved with Beethoven Bagatelles in an order that seemed calculated to set up a conversation across a century and a half. Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s curation and playing achieved exactly that. Both composers project a combination of whimsy and tenderness, levity and gravitas, so the juxtaposition, I thought, worked extremely well. I think Brendel would have appreciated the playful ingenuity. It is worth noting that in 1953 Ligeti arranged 6 of the 11 pieces for wind quintet, under the name ‘Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet’.
Almost exactly three years ago at the EIF, Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou played a four-hands duet programme of late Schubert masterpieces interspersed with György Kurtág miniatures from his Játékok books. In my review of that concert, I remarked, in relation to the Kurtág:
“Is this plinky-plonk music? Well, it is rather, but these are like keenly observed line drawings, whimsically brief, with more hinted than stated. Would I travel 100 miles to hear a programme of nothing else? Definitely not. But as a skilfully-performed palate-cleanser between the poignant musings of a terminally ill Schubert, they were just the job. Any further description would be longer than the pieces themselves.”
Although Aimard’s recital interspersed the Kurtág with Schubert pieces characterised mostly by brevity and even light-hearted lyrical frivolity, my view of the character of the Játékok remains the same. But the Schubert became the ‘palate-cleanser’. And, again, it worked. There was enough Schubertian delight to cast the Kurtág in sharper relief and it acquitted itself in the spotlight. Not that the Schubert miniatures were mere frippery. I was surprised to hear a melody in No.6 of the 1823 ‘12 Deutsche Ländler’ that is definitely quoted a year later in the ‘Death and the Maiden’ string quartet. Brendel would have loved that. The Schubert pieces were delightful, in particular the Ländler.
And this was the second concert in under 24 hours (about 15) to prove that there is nothing remotely intrinsically deficient in a programme of miniatures. Not by a long chalk.
Link: https://www.eif.co.uk/events/pierre-laurent-aimard