WHEN Messiaen’s great work La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ first flooded the Albert Hall in the Proms of 1969, a diminutive 12-year-old boy sat spellbound in the audience. He was there for a special treat.
He’d done rather well in his June exams at the Paris Conservatoire under the tutelage of Messiaen’s wife, Yvonne Loriod — and M and Mme Messiaen had brought him along for the UK premiere at the Prom. Thirty-five years on, the little boy pianist is back: Pierre-Laurent Aimard is prefacing his chart-topping performance of Charles Ives’s great Concord Sonata with one of Messiaen’s birdsong classics, Le Merle noir, which he will play with the flautist Emily Beynon in their chamber-music concert.
At the end of the Ives Sonata, there’s a sorrowful solo for flute — a birdsong which Ives, and doubtless Thoreau before him, heard by the Walden pond. The Messiaen blackbird will become a pre-echo of this. And it is a touching tribute to the composer and mentor who took the fledgeling Aimard under his wing.
As a child, Aimard had plans to study with another piano teacher. “But,” he remembers, “when Yvonne Loriod heard me play in a competition in Lyons at the end of my studies, she said: ‘Ce petit, je le veux’ — ‘I want this little one.’ And she stole me. It was an incredible source of joy to me: Messiaen was my hero and my god. For three years I’d go and live with them in their summer house. I was so moved that someone so great and not so young could have so much warmth for so many students — and for a little boy of 12.”
The Messiaen epiphany was to shape Aimard’s entire life. At the age of 19 he was appointed solo pianist for Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain; and since the mid-1980s he has collaborated with the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who chose Aimard to record his complete works for piano.
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Aimard is a zealous champion of contemporary music, teaching as much as he performs; and he is also one of its freest spirits. It’s the composer’s independence and freedom that turned Aimard on to Ives: the fact that his immense, eclectic tribute to the New England Transcendentalists, Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau and their circle, is music of endless possibilities, constrained by nothing. Yet the Concord Sonata is hardly cutting-edge: the composer died way back in 1954. I asked Aimard if he thought that, after the baggage of serialism, modernism and postmodernism, any comparable freedom was possible for composers today?
“It is a goal we can focus on. The greatest artists will always create a high level of freedom, in very different contexts — even within a collective language. Think of Beethoven. We can use all our inherited cultural information not just to memorise it, but to give us courage to learn its lessons. When inheritance gives us the ability and strength to look towards the future, then we have freedom. Otherwise, we are just prisoners of culture.”
With so many composers revelling in the comforts of tonality, mystical minimalism, and the like, have we gone soft on the avant-garde? “Well, I wouldn’t disagree,” Aimard says. “But there are always moments and personalities which incarnate the way forward. A lack of compromise is still the treasury of so many artists. For me, Harrison Birtwistle is the very incarnation of that.”
Aimard will perform Birtwistle’s Antiphonies for piano and orchestra at the Festival Hall on October 31. “I am very bored to live in a world that contains so much music that wants to please the masses. Even if music is sold in a ‘classical’ slot, it doesn’t mean the composition is necessarily significant. I’m watching for talents, like Birtwistle, who will disturb me again and again. Mankind needs constant courage and challenge.”
But why does new music seem, for so many listeners, much more difficult to grasp and enjoy than, for instance, its contemporaries in the visual and literary arts?
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“It is true that there is a problem with music. And it’s an age-old one, which refers to a universe of sounds, to the abstraction of music. And, above all, to the lack of musical education. It’s just much harder to get information about new music than about new painting.”
Hence Aimard’s missionary zeal. “I’ve given so many workshops. Even when people don’t like the music I play, when I give them keys and clues, so many misunderstandings are over. Interpreters should also be translators. Today, most interpreters are in charge of the past. Culture must challenge an audience, not merely entertain.”
Aimard’s hardline view is by no means new. “This addiction to entertainment has been an enemy in every epoch. Schumann wrote about it. It’s not a peculiarity of today. Easy success and demagogy have always existed. But so has curiosity. If we are willing to make the effort to communicate with people of good will, then we shall find translators for even the most foreign of languages.”
Aimard has recently been acclaimed for a startling sidestep in his career: recording the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos with the periodinstrument specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt. “As a human being I need both the future and the past,” declares Aimard. “There are children, and there are parents. We cannot sacrifice one generation to another. Our first role is to interpret the music of today. But we must also renew the old.”
So Aimard moves ahead to Mozart, to projects with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and, next season, plans to take his first steps with Brahms. “And after that I have appointments with Mr Liszt, Mr Debussy and Mr Ravel. It is an immense work.”