Cheltenham Music Festival (2): Bartók, Kurtág, Benjamin, Schumann, Debussy Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano), Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham, 07.07.2006 (AO)

and

Berio, Stockhausen Markus Stockhausen  (trumpet), Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham, 07.07.2006 (AO)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s technique is so agile that it’s said he must have twenty fingers and double jointed wrists.  Each piece in this programme is deceptively simple: some of the pieces in Bartók’s Mikrocosmos and Kurtág’s Játékok can be played on one hand.  Generations of children have learned the piano by following some of these exercises and The Golliwog’s Cakewalk was my own first introduction to modern music.  So why would a supreme virtuoso like Aimard perform pieces he could almost play with his hands tied in which his score reading skills don’t count ? 

I wish that everyone who struggled learning to play Kinderszenen or  Children’s Corner could have heard Aimard play.  On the one hand, they’d weep because he makes it seem so easy, but on the other, he imparts a much more profound lesson :  that there is more to music than just playing notes.  The secret is to love the music for what it is.  Sadly, rigid teaching drives that instinct out of too many young players. But Aimard himself, and the composers featured tonight, understood that children are naturally open minded and receptive.   Their pieces were written to draw young minds into the spirit of music. 

The eight excerpts from Játékok were not expressly written for children – one celebrates a friend’s 60^th birthday -  but their essence is defineitely playfulness.  Kurtág's miniatures are called “games” because they are fun and open ended.  In the film by Judit Kele, herself a dedicatee of one of the composer’s “games”, heard here, Kurtág says of the Játékok ambiance that he was making “transformed nothingness into music”, meaning that creative imagination can turn the simplest stimuli into art.  Kele’s films about Kurtág, “The Matchstick Man” and “Exercises” have just been released by Ideale Audience as part of their acclaimed Juxtapositions series (Ideale-Audience DVD 90516).  In the first film, Kurtág explains how early music developed from a single note, gradually varied and he sings in latin to demonstrate !  In the second film, the conductor I Ming Huang encourages a group of children to experiment with the keyboard, literally “playing” with sound. Then there’s a clip of Kurtág himself playing one of his “games”.  It is this spirit of freedom which makes creative music.  The children were having fun, but were learning a very profound lesson at the same time. 

George Benjamin’s Piano Figures, was written for Aimard, specifically for his commitment to young musicians.  At its world premiere in Luxembourg in 2005, it was first played by children who Aimard had trained and then by Aimard himself.  These pieces, lasting barely a minute each, take ideas like the pounding a ball against a wall, and develop them into something musical.  There’s a jaunty song that leaps out of nowhere and ends abruptly. Another flies exuberantly across the scales.  The piece works on two levels.  It gets the children excited by what music can do, then, when played by a master, alone and without context, it is a work all about intervals, in which the interest lies, conversely, in what isn’t played.  The sounds serve to frame the silences, and make us listen to the void.  It’s a sophisticated concept, totally in accord with what Kurtág was saying about contemplating the silence within. 

This approach coloured the familiar Schumann and Debussy after the interval.  Aimard took it as given that a festival audience of adults would know these works well.  His approach was more contemplative than usual, focussing on the purity behind the music, rather than the notes as such.  It’s hard to explain, but it felt like he was observing something deeper beneath the surface, and connecting somehow to the frame of mind that inspired the works in the first place.  His direct, unfussy playing, literally “coloured the nuances of the silence” in the intervals between sounds.  It felt like connecting to the innocence and wonder of being young.

The idea of creative openness in the first concert was reinforced in the second concert of the evening, an exploration by Markus Stockhausen of Berio’s Sequenza X for trumpet in C and piano resonance.  We’ve seen photos of Stockhausen as a boy, playing on the beach with his famous father, but as soon as he started playing, all that faded.  This Stockhausen is very much his own man.  His interests lie in “intuitive music”.  It’s not free improvisation, though each performance is unique.  Stockhausen developed the “piano resonance” beyond simply blowing into the piano and making the mechanisms reverberate.  He played piano and trumpet simultaneously, and used taped sound which he manipulated manually to blend with what he was doing on the trumpet.  I wasn’t too sure about the taped music which was uncomfortably close to New Age for my taste, but it certainly seemed to inspire his trumpet improvisations.   It was still what Berio himself described about his concept of the sequence, using the trumpet “in a direct and natural way”, allowing the “nudity” of the instrument to reveal its many forms.  A large part of the audience for this concert had come expressly for it, rather than remaining on spec after Aimard, who himself stayed to listen. It was wonderful that they appreciated Stockhausen’s freedom of imagination and creativity, for that’s what the whole evening was about.

 

Anne Ozorio