Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Musikfest Berlin recital at the Kammermusiksaal marked the joint 150th anniversaries of Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives. In the first half, we heard Schoenberg’s complete works for solo piano, moving from the earliest break into atonality to the development of twelve-tone methods. Aimard’s performance found both body and sound in a state of concentrated tension, moving from introspective stasis to sudden flurries of impassioned gestures. During the Drei Klavierstücke, he could be heard murmuring along with the music, his body moving expressively around the keyboard’s centre-point, foot tapping on the floor. The Sechs kleine Klavierstücke offered flows, outbursts and sometimes extreme concision, the last movement, reportedly written at the shock of Mahler’s death, a mere nine bars long. Aimard here gave us Schoenberg with an edge, as befits the rhythmic impetus he brings to Messiaen and Ligeti, but he was also willing to hold back, sinking into the expressive depths of near-silence.
Following the pensively turbulent Klavierstücke, the first half ended with the Suite für Klavier, a piece characterised by the tension between old and new. Schoenberg’s first piece to use tone-rows, it also adopts the form of a Baroque dance suite. In Aimard’s performance, the suite took on a twittering, even capering quality, as tone-rows were made to dance the gavotte, minuet and gigue. Aimard matched the work’s austere precision with a wilder edge, skittering along helter-skelter or slowing almost to a crawl, a trill hovering as if about to trip over itself. After a particularly lively Musette, he pulled his hand away from the keyboard in a gesture that looked like a tennis player’s fist-pump; with the final flourish of the Gigue he looked about ready to jump off his stool.
In the Concord Sonata, Ives’ monumental four-movement portrait of New England Transcendentalism in the years preceding the Civil War, Aimard combined the virtues of virtuosic precision with that same edge of wild energy. The piece begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson contemplating eternity, the ‘fate’ motif from Beethoven’s Fifth hammered out within dense chords or wafting by at the tail end of melodies. In Aimard’s hands, the music was questioningly affirmative. The second movement, a “phantasmagoria” inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a music of contrasts. Arpeggiating into dreamy reverie, a florid melody is unexpectedly capped off with a cluster played with a block of wood. Aimard delivered the music with a jubilant exuberance that at times even approached swing.
After the lyrical interlude of The Alcotts – the fate motif transformed into a pensive parlour song, then a church hymn – the final movement presents Henry David Thoreau contemplating late summer on Walden Pond. Aimard leant into the magically contemplative opening. The hall was rapt as the music moved into a melody based on the opening notes to Stephen Foster’s Down in the Cornfield, Ives’ father’s favourite song. Given the controversy surrounding Foster’s minstrel songs, this echo may seem troubling, though Donald Berman has recently suggested that the text represents slaves celebrating, rather than mourning, the death of a master, highlighting Thoreau’s abolitionism. Alongside, we heard a gently tolling, repeated three-note figure that Ives meant to suggest the tempo of nature. In the spellbinding conclusion, this figure fades to nothing, a moment treated by Aimard with an unobtrusive reverence.
For an encore, Aimard offered Ruth Crawford Seeger’s fast and furious Piano Study in mixed accents (1930). It’s easy to hear, he explained, why György Ligeti used to give this piece to friends. At little over a minute long, it offered a tantalising preview of the Seeger programme that unfolds in further concerts as part of this year’s Musikfest. If it’s anything as good as this recital, Berlin is in for a treat.
