MUSIKFREUNDE

Pierre-Laurent Aimard delighted the audience at the Musikverein Perspektiven with piano music from Bach to the presence. In an interview with Walter Weidringer for "Musikfreunde", the magazine of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, he shares exciting insights into the complex thoughts behind the composition of his finely woven program:

"Titanic" was his performance of the "new Magna Charta of piano playing", it said in the "FAZ", Pierre-Laurent Aimard had mastered "the impossible" in György Ligeti's Etudes: Just one example of the brilliant reviews that this perfectionist of the piano recently received at the Salzburg Festival. Pierre-Laurent Aimard now returns to the Musikverein with one of his clever, meticulously constructed and emotionally charged programs: music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Schubert enters into dialogue with works by György Kurtág and a piece by Serbian composer Milica Djordjević. And when we talk about dialog here, it doesn't just mean a chance encounter on the same evening: the combination of the Musikverein Perspectives in collaboration with architect Peter Zumthor and the Wien Modern Festival inspires this phenomenal pianist to create particularly rich and varied encounters.

Mr. Aimard, you are not only famous for your breathtaking ability to play Ligeti's "Études", for example, but also for your concert programmes, which you often present without a break or at least as a whole in each half of the concert. Are there certain principles to your dramaturgy? Or do you take a more associative approach?

I don't have any general principles. Of course, the actual creativity happens when composing, but we performers are also allowed to be creative, and that shouldn't be lost in our industrialized era. So I try to find a meaningful program from scratch for every occasion. In this case, two institutions come together. One can seem like a temple of tradition: the Musikverein; the other represents the forces of the new: Wien Modern. I have tried to build a common world in a creative way. At the same time, this wonderful residence by Peter Zumthor comes from the Musikverein. This inspired me to create a double construction, two antiphonies, but based on different principles. In the first part, the fraternization of Johann Sebastian Bach and György Kurtág focuses attention on the material. With Bach, even the smallest architecture develops from a strong theme; every basic idea develops extreme structural power. This includes so many layers that all possible developments in the piece sound organic. Kurtág's basic material is also strikingly communicative, but his strategy is completely different: he made a tabula rasa and then unfolded his composition from scratch. That's how many of his pieces sound, at least to me. So in both cases the material is very striking, but is then organized quite differently. My program plays with this contrast.

What is it like in the second part, when Kurtág and Franz Schubert meet?

The music is generally more atmospheric, moods become more important. I have chosen more recent Kurtág works; they take us into a world of poetry, dreams and intimacy. And Schubert's dances may be short, but they are rich in substance, deep and existential. No less than Schubert's greatest pieces, they bring essential human dimensions to life. The vibrations between these two partners are no longer clearly separated, but full of ambiguities and ambivalence, sometimes the boundaries seem to blur. Together with the mysterious "Role-playing 1: strings attached", a work created in 2019 by composer Milica Djordjević, who was born in Belgrade in 1984, the whole thing takes on a somnambulistic quality. Two completely different parts emerge from two juxtapositions, which in turn complement each other. All in all, it is a paradoxical invitation to the audience to listen to what is actually a very private, intimate piano recital in a large concert hall. The time of the pandemic also resonates here, when we were isolated, suffered a lack of public encounters with music and were forced to develop a different relationship to it. Perhaps that taught us the importance of intimacy anew. For me as a performer, this is an important statement in a world that is now so focused on show.

Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" is at least also a plea for a certain new way of tuning the twelve notes on the piano, of bringing the keys into a tolerable relationship with each other, of closing the circle of fifths satisfactorily in the first place without it sounding too weird. Back then, it was not the equal temperament tuning that we use today, but a variant suggested by Andreas Werckmeister. Today we are no longer aware of this, or at least don't care. What does this „Well-Tempered Clavier" mean to you, what facets does it have?

As is so often the case with Bach's projects that have been pursued for so long, the "Well-Tempered Clavier" with its two volumes is a sum and a compendium, a manifesto and a postulate for a new, well-tempered world. It is the piece of a revolution! The enormous variety results from the use of all keys for one prelude and one fugue per volume, and at that time each key was still a separate universe because of the clear differences in their intervals. This results in a comprehensive exhibition of different types of polyphony, virtuosity, styles, traditions, origins and inspirations. It is also a piece for practicing, something you play just for yourself. And for God - as the architect of the universe. This list could go on and on, that's the unique thing about these Bach cycles. I could hardly live without returning to these works regularly.

György Kurtág is a very intimate and at the same time very gestural composer, a master of omission, there are relatively few notes on paper, but they are very expressive. Is that initially more difficult than the usual virtuosity, which sometimes includes even more notes in even less time?

Probably yes. If everything is expressed with very sparse material, then the discipline on the part of the performer must be very high in order to justify this economy. This applies to Webern anyway, to some extent to Mozart and many others, and there are also often striking examples of this in the visual arts. What is so special about Kurtág's "Játékok" is the art of - I deliberately don't say reduction, but rather immaculacy, purity and concentration. Short, completely authentic thoughts and feelings run through a perfectionist filter and are put down on paper in the form of a diary. With Bach it is an intimacy of the musician-worker, he saw himself as a craftsman; with Schubert it is movement of the dance and the heart, of feeling.

How important is what Kurtág meant and inspired for you as a interpreter and for us as an audience? Should we know his titles and inspirations beforehand? Or is it enough to know them afterwards? Debussy put the titles of his preludes at the end of the notes, in angle brackets ...

As always: more information brings more understanding. For those who know the titles and the different levels of the stories behind the individual pieces, the richness of the music will shine even brighter. But they are also important for another reason: in today's society, classical music is no longer as anchored and present as it used to be. It is all the more important to learn that there are still people for whom music plays an enormous role in everyday life. I recently visited György Kurtág in Budapest to work with him on some of his works. When he heard that friends of ours were unwell, he spontaneously composed a piece and sent it to them: as his personal consolation and encouragement. It's an incredible way of breathing music in every moment. The titles can be a key for us.

So he's still in good shape for his 97 years?

And how! I can only wish that my head still works as well at this age.

Franz Schubert is said to have once asked: Do you know any happy music? That suggests no - and that would mean that he couldn't have written any himself. How does that fit in with dances, with light music in general?

The function of these pieces should be entertainment, but Schubert the man has no illusions: Life and death are inseparable for him, it's like that in actually all of his music, and I particularly love that. The artist experiences this dualism at every turn - and Schubert can sometimes convey this to us in pieces of no more than 20 seconds.

The interview was by Walter Weidringer. This material is used with the kind permission of the Wiener Musikverein.