With Pierre-Laurent Aimard within the backyard of delights | Culture | EUROtoday

A couple of kilometers from the National Auditorium, in room 56A of the Prado Museum, two bare lovers have been locked in a glass bubble on the verge of breaking for 5 centuries. Hieronymus Hieronymus painted them round 1500 within the central panel of The backyard of delightsand Olivier Messiaen integrated them in 1948 into the sixth motion of his Turangalîla Symphonyas he acknowledges in his Treaty. Last Thursday the twenty third, in the course of the eleven minutes of Garden of affection’s dreamMadrid concurrently hosted each variations of that scene: the pictorial and the musical.

And, for as soon as, it was the latter that appeared most fragile and evocative. The piano, miraculously incisive and unattached, by Pierre-Laurent Aimard evoked the tune of the nightingale in love and that of the blackbird, wrapped within the muted string chorale on the theme of affection by the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya (OBC), performed with very best flight by Jonathan Nott, together with the magical garnish of “drops of lunar water” offered by Thomas Bloch from the Martenot waves. A real sound oasis, the spotlight of the live performance that closed the 68-year-old French pianist’s residency on the National Center for Musical Diffusion (CNDM), in collaboration with Ibermúsica.

Aimard’s hyperlink with the solo a part of the Turangalîla Symphony It is virtually lifelong. He studied it on the Paris Conservatory with Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s spouse, which supplies him virtually genealogical authority. At simply 16 years outdated he received the Messiaen Prize (1973) and since then maintained a detailed relationship with the composer, whom he had met 4 years earlier than. He selected it for his debut within the United States, on the age of twenty, as soloist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and recorded it in 2000 with the Berlin Philharmonic underneath the course of Kent Nagano (Teldec), in one of many phonographic references of this huge rating: ten actions and about eighty minutes in size through which love, pleasure and demise are celebrated with orchestral exuberance, combining Hindu rhythms and echoes of the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.

The Frenchman exhibited an unavoidable mixture of feline vitality and complicated colorism to fulfill the 2 aspects that Messiaen offers him in this type of concertante symphony with piano: the dynamic and livid position of the fifth actions (Joy of the blood of the celebs) and tenth (Final), and the fragile and decorative of the birdsongs of the sixth. Its first nice flash got here, nevertheless, within the fourth motion (love tune 2), with a last cadence of steely precision, culminating in a cluster of notable rigidity. Another related second was the beginning of the seventh (Turangalîla 2), the briefest and most atonal, the place he outlined the tune of the blackbird with an virtually mocking bias.

Several percussion devices responded to that episode with an intricate rhythmic warp, articulated in particular ostinatos and with virtually mathematical interplay. The percussion part shone, strengthened with eight extra musicians, in an expanded OBC—like the remainder of the sections—to exceed 100 instrumentalists on stage. The Catalan workforce carried out solidly within the everybody extra dizzying, though it confirmed sure limitations within the extra rhythmically uncovered passages, significantly within the fifth and tenth actions.

The course of Jonathan Nott, in his first collaboration with the OBC after his current debut with what shall be his future orchestra on the Gran Teatre del Liceu, compensated for these limitations with an lively studying with nice structural impulse, sustained by steady rigidity and notable sonic energy within the closings of every of the ten actions. The last ovations had been largely directed at his work, which was capable of clearly articulate the foremost thematic blocks—that of the statue, that of the flower—with out giving up a calculated dose of abandon in probably the most orgiastic episodes. The rapport with Aimard was full, the results of a sustained collaboration since Nott’s time on the head of the Ensemble Intercontemporain within the early 2000s.

Aimard started his residency on the CNDM on October 30, with an admirable chamber live performance across the Quartet for the tip of timeby Messiaen, along with the violinist Isabelle Faust, the cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and the clarinetist Jörg Widmann. Then got here a recital for 2 pianos along with his disciple Lorenzo Soulès, one other solo devoted to Kurtág and Bach, and a efficiency within the Lied Cycle with soprano Anna Prohaska. This week has culminated with the Turangalîla Symphonythough preceded, on Tuesday the twenty first, by one other “garden of delights”.

It was an unclassifiable recital, included within the Frontiers cycle, through which Aimard articulated an intimate program round quick piano dances by Schubert, punctuated by music by Mozart, Schönberg, Webern and Kurtág, and distributed on 5 pianos. Four had been positioned on the stage of the symphony corridor of the National Auditorium, surrounded by the general public, and the fifth, in an higher gallery. The thought appears to have arisen in the course of the confinement of the pandemic, when the pianist took refuge in Schubert’s miniatures, though it didn’t materialize till October 2024 on the Philharmonie in Paris. The recital was titled The masters of the intimate and it was introduced as “a spatialized concert that rethinks the recital format to pay tribute to those who Aimard considers ‘the masters of the intimate’, from Mozart and Schubert to Kurtág.”

Aimard opened the night in Madrid by displaying his authority as a Kurtág participant on a Bösendorfer with a Disklavier system, able to recording and reproducing what the pianist performs. He began his number of Gamesby the now centenary Hungarian composer, with A flower for Nuriaa tribute to Nuria Schönberg—daughter of the composer and likewise virtually a centenarian—conceived in two components: a primary that sonorously evokes the opening of a flower and one other, reserved by Aimard to shut the recital, which suggests its closure. Two extra miniatures adopted, however in Tribute à Vidovszky He let the Disklavier recording play whereas he moved, like a sleepwalker, in the direction of the Steinway grand to begin Schubert’s miniatures.

The Frenchman stunned in 2024 with an album on Pentatone that introduced collectively a big selection of 107 of these miniatures by the Viennese composer. For this Madrid recital he selected 32, through which he confirmed a stolen versatile and contained, together with a really enticing idiomatic naturalness. He revered some repetitions and suppressed many others, in a deliberate asymmetry that underlined the multiplicity of this music, each superficial and infinitely deep. This is what occurred when, after some insubstantial ländler, he attacked the attractive False quantity. 13, op. 50/D. 779.

There was no room for applause in that intimate environment, favored by dim lighting. Schubert was adopted by the extraordinary microdramas of the Six small items, op. 19by Schönberg, which Aimard performed with the identical edge and rhythmic drive that he utilized to Messiaen, however with an admirable kaleidoscope of dynamics. He used the Disklavier recording once more, now with a German dance by Schubert, to maneuver to an upright Yamaha, the place he addressed the Variations, op. 27by Webern. It was the very best of the night: he made probably the most summary and twelve-tone piano writing sound with an sudden poetic fluidity.

At Webern he once more built-in the Disklavier recording into the central variation, Very quick. Then he used it once more with Schubert to maneuver to the Schiedmayer celesta, through which he performed solely the Andante for mechanical organ, Okay. 616by Mozart, whereas the March, Okay. 408/1 sounded from the Bösendorfer Disklavier and Aimard returned to the Steinway. The continuity between what was performed stay and what was recorded by the Disklavier system was very best. The recital ended with the pianist’s disappearance from the general public’s view: his sound could possibly be discerned from one of many higher galleries, enjoying a fifth piano, whereas he closed with Schubert and rounded off with Kurtág a unique and, to a sure extent, fascinating musical expertise.