Pierre-Laurent Aimard, The Liszt Project – Bartók; Berg; Messiaen; Ravel; Scriabin; Stroppa; Wagner
Featured Album
Making an intellectual case for Liszt's music
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth. We’re seeing a trove of new recordings: debuts from young recitalists, box sets of accounts from old heavies, reissues, remasters and all the rest. In short, it’s Lisztomania. And, oh-ho — here comes Pierre-Laurent Aimard with The Liszt Project, a two-disc set in which the soloist, Adelburgh Festival curator and all-around genius takes on a composer whose work he’s barely touched (on recordings at least).
So what does he mean by “project,” aside from, you know, performing some of the man’s music? First of all, it means playing Liszt just slightly more than he plays other composers. There’s more than an hour here of solo piano works by Wagner, Ravel, Scriabin, Berg and…uh, Olivier Messiaen. These are all great pieces. But the point of including them, it seems clear, is to rip Liszt away from the sentimental, show-offy hands of piano contest winners and make an intellectual case for this music. “[O]ne might often wish that he’d been a little more focused and had striven to impose a more rigorous sense of form on all this wealth of material,” Aimard says of Liszt in the liner notes. “One” might, you say! Left unspoken is the suggestion that if Liszt couldn’t manage to do this on his own, Aimard can impose that rigor on the music now.
The Sonata in B Minor suffers the most from Aimard’s over-determined intellectual impulses. While it’s striking to hear this famous and oft-recorded piece played with such monastic evenness — the big changes in soft/loud dynamics even feel perfectly controlled — the end effect is also a little bloodless. Messiaen’s music can seem Zen and profound when Aimard plays it this way, but it’s not always the best approach to apply to Liszt. (From this year’s batch of Liszt recordings, I prefer Nino Gvetadze’s B Minor Sonata, which comes complete with an edge and an ability to get carried away with itself.)
Aimard does better with the excerpts from the Years of Pilgrimage suites. Nor does the pianist’s technique on these pieces seem incongruous next to the inclusion of some of Messiaen’s birdsongs. The first half of the opening disc also throws listeners a bunch of killer curveballs. The transition from Lizst’s “Nuages gris” to Berg’s Piano Sonata makes sense and is well executed — it’s the tritones in both pieces that link them, in Aimard’s mind — but pales next to the fun of following a slow account of Liszt’s “Unstern!” with Scriabin’s “Black Mass” sonata. There are a lot of ideas to study and ponder on these two discs, and that’s surely how Aimard wanted it. If a few of the experiments turn out to feel overly academic, that’s fine. We’ll still have those 200 other flashy recordings of the B Minor Sonata, when we want that.
