Pierre-Laurent Aimard recital (piano)

A graduate of the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, avant-garde composer György Kurtág is today considered the patriarch of Hungarian music and is an object of international admiration. Of all his works, Játékok (Games) is the most frequently performed. His four volumes of miniatures appeared between 1975 and 1979 with the aim of introducing young pianists to contemporary music (forming, as it were, a continuation of Bartók’s Micro-Cosmos). Gradually they transformed into something akin to the composer’s diary. Today Kurtág’s Játékok is most frequently performed by adults, including the composer himself together with his wife. The  cycle Splitters emerged at the same time as Játékok. The  music was initially intended for the cymbals, hence the jerky nature of the sound intonation.

Robert Schumann’s cycle Bunte Blätter (1852) owes its enigmatic title to the publisher’s wariness. Schumann had wished to call it Spreu as this volume of works includes a total of fourteen pieces that had been omitted from other already published editions. The re are, however, true pearls to be found among this “chaff”. Most of these miniatures were composed in 1838 and Schumann later returned to them, moved either by some mood of nostalgia or an interest in easy-listening music to be performed in private residences – albeit late, the composer came to value the modest charm of the Biedermeier style.
The  first of the  Drei Stückchen that opens the volume bears the dedication “To my dear friend at Christmas, 1838” and the third was originally entitled Jagdstück. The  second piece from Funf Albumblätter was initially and mysteriously called Fata Morgana and the fourth Jugendschmerz. The  third, waltz-like Albumblatt was intended for the famous Carnaval and the fantastical scherzo Novellette was not, at the time, included in the famous anthology of eight novelettes.

If in Bunte Blätter Schumann returned to the past, in his late works Franz Liszt, as he himself reported, was “looking into the future.” In the piece Unstern! Sinistre, disastro (1881) he abandoned the confines of tonality, briefly reviving it in the choral episode with the remark quasi organo before once again abandoning it in order to break the work off mid-phrase. The  gloomy nature of the music speaks of the deep depression that cast great despondency over the composer’s final years.
The  piece Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este (1877) forms part of the third and final part of the anthology Années de pèlerinage. Here Liszt also takes on the role of prophet: the play of water was to become one of the French impressionists’ pet themes. Somewhat later the Italian Ottorino Respighi – apparently not without being influenced by Liszt’s piano music Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este and Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este – composed two expansive symphonic scores: Fontane di Roma and Pini di Roma. Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este truly does open in the spirit of the yet-to-emerge impressionist movement, but subsequently the music repeats its leonine power and romantic pathos (although some contemporary performers veil these elements).

In Rome the young Claude Debussy heard Liszt perform. Several of his virtuoso works – among them some preludes – make one suspect that his impressions of Rome remained with him for rather a long time. In his second set of Préludes (1913) there are twelve compositions. Voiles is one of the composer’s “emblems” (in the 1920s the next generation of French composers rose up against the “mists of impressionism”). Pianist Margaret Long, however, wrote in her memoirs Au Piano avec Claude Debussy that “Debussy protested against being considered an impressionist. A symbolist does not describe life, rather he embodies it in his music with a rare degree of refinement. And these preludes, light and gracious masterpieces, tender, deep and melancholy, are a recreation of those unfathomable sensations for which there are no words in language…” Debussy did indeed give the preludes titles, though he placed these afterwards and not before so that audiences would first discover the music without knowing in advance which images they “should” recognise within them. It was, of course, a game.
Anna Bulycheva