I enjoyed last season’s recital at Alice Tully Hall by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, which I reviewed for Classical Source. This season’s recital on the big stage at Carnegie Hall was even more satisfying.

While I admire Olivier Messiaen’s early 8 Préludes for piano, I had been of the opinion that the more pondrous second (“Chant d’extase dans un paysage triste”) and sixth (“Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu”) preludes could have used a good editing — that is, until last night. Aimard has me sold on these two preludes now. His ability to sustain the lingering mystery of the former was astonishing. Even more impressively, in “Cloches” Aimard maintains total command of long phrases — and the slow but inexorable rhythmic momentum and unwieldy structure of the latter using additive rhythmic values as the main motif returns again and again in longer and longer form (Messiaen would use this same technique shortly thereafter in “Neumes rhythmiques”, usually performed as the second of the 4 etudes de rhythme). The entire cycle was spellbinding from beginning to end. Aimard did seem to amp up the dynamics in the quieter passages, but may have been tempering them for the hall’s reverberant acoustics.

A decade ago, Aiimard would be about the last pianist i could imagine playing Chopin in recital — I still had him pigeonholed as the go-to post-IRCAM new music pianist on the European scene (he was still a couple of years away from recording his provocative Beethoven concerto cycle with Nikolaus Harnoincourt). Aimard does not completely eschew sentimentality in Chopin, but keeps it under such tight rein that for once one could hear not only the “big picture” of the Barcarolle and the Scherzo (No.2) in b-flat minor but every note. This was the polar interpretive opposite of Chopin-as-effete-salon-figure; Aimard’s detailed playing would at once evoke Schumann, at other times reveal portents of virtuoso piano fare from the height of the romantic era to late Rachmaninoff.

Aimard brought to Ravel’s Miroirs a good deal more rubato, wide dynamics, and yet more detailed playing than I’ve ever heard in live Ravel. The work was written in 1905, but seems at least a decade and a half ahead of its time. It also makes an interesting cvomplement to the Messiaen Préludes of more than two decades later; you can hear portents of Messiaen’s use of bird calls in his keyboard music in the second movement of Miroirs, “Oiseaux tristes”, and the final movement, “La vallée des cloches”, inspired by the sound of church bells in Paris, does hold similarities to Messiaen’s “Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu”.

I didn’t immediately recognize the first of Aimard’s encores, the pianissimo, monodic “Hommage à Ferenc Berényi 70” from György Kurtyág’s Játékok, which would have been better without the audience coughs in the first few seconds. The final encore, Harrison Birtwistle’s Clocks IV, unwinds in the composer’s unashamedly terse, complex postserialist harmonic style, and Aimard conveyed the not-so-mechanical timepiece with refinement and humor.

Aimard has become the pianist I thought Maurizio Pollini would become two decades ago: a daring champion of twentieth century music and provocative programmer. The last three Aimard recitals I’ve seen have been tyhoroughly satisfying; a pity I can’t say the same of Pollini, who seems far more at ease in the studio than in fromt of an audience these days.

UPDATE: Here is Elizabeth Barnette’s review at Classical Source.