Now that Pierre-Laurent
Aimard is turning his attention more
readily to mainstream repertoire, it
gives us a chance to put into a wider
context the qualities in his playing.
That he is one of the modern breed of
‘super-virtuosos’ there can be no doubt.
He positively revels in complexities,
eating up fistfuls of notes and spitting
them out with ease. With much of the
music he has specialised in (Ligeti,
Ives, Carter) that factor has been more
than enough to carry the day, but with
a piece such as Gaspard, with
its multi-layered pictorial evocations,
we obviously need more. There is so
much competition in this music that
something rather special is required,
and while this is extremely good, I’m
not sure it is lifted above the likes
of Argerich, Pogorelich (my favourite)
or Hewitt.
You would think with
a technique like Aimard’s, that the
tricky shimmering ostinato that
opens Ondine would be perfectly
stable. It must be a conscious decision,
but it seems rather lumpy and uneven
to me, especially when compared to,
say, Jean-Yves Thibaudet on Decca, a
reading full of poetry and insight.
Maybe Aimard finds it too easy,
though I like his treatment of the big
climactic passage later on. His Gibet
is very steady, even slower than Pogorelich,
but tension is maintained through his
colouring of the hallucinatory harmonies
that surround the repeated B flat. This
is beautifully cool and calculated,
drained of excess and all the more effective
for it – try the passage at 2’45, truly
pp sans expression. Scarbo
brings the sort of qualities we expect
of Aimard to the fore, malevolence,
menace, daredevil virtuosity easily
in the Argerich mould. I still find
Pogorelich’s kaleidoscopic shifts in
colour unbeatable in this movement,
but Aimard is impressive and though-provoking
in his superb control and ice-cool detachment.
Gaspard comes
with a very wide variety of couplings,
but Aimard’s Carter is as valid as any.
The main work is entitled Night Fantasies,
and is as terrifying as anything in
the Ravel. The composer describes it
as ‘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’.
I suppose this gives the composer a
wide brief, a sort of ‘anything goes’,
although anyone familiar with Carter’s
style may know what to expect. There
are a lot of notes, a thorny diversity
of texture, an exceptionally wide-ranging
use of the keyboard but no melodies
as we know them, more a shifting series
of episodes explored through a diverse
palette of sound. It may not be to everyone’s
taste, but this is meat and drink to
Aimard, whose phenomenal grasp of Carter’s
complex sound-world puts him on a par
with those other Carter keyboard champions,
Charles Rosen and Ursula Oppens. The
two shorter works display similar tendencies,
though there is a cheeky, minimalist
charm to 90+, written for the
90th birthday of another
long-lived composer, Goffredo Petrassi.
Hearing intelligent,
erudite musicians talk about music is
always worthwhile, so the bonus disc
is to be welcomed even if it does, understandably,
concentrate on the less familiar Carter
works. The recorded sound is a little
close for my taste but the instrument
is in good shape and is well caught
generally. Liner notes by modern music
expert Paul Griffiths are fairly short
but very readable. Excellent Gaspards
are legion in the catalogue, but if
you fancy the offbeat coupling, don’t
hesitate.
Tony Haywood
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano) 
