A Recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard piano

Pierre Boulez

Twelve Notations

Pierre Boulez, the famous avatar of twentieth-century serialism known for rigorous compositional structures, returned to his works again and again through his life, producing revisions, re-instrumentations, or re-imaginings of older pieces to be explored and exploded. The Twelve Notations (Douze Notations) are the most extreme example of this tendency. Boulez composed the pieces in the month of December 1945, aged twenty; they were one of his first pieces performed publicly (by a fellow student of Messiaen, Yvette Grimaud) at a concert in February 1946. Beginning in 1980, he began creating new versions of the pieces for large orchestra; more than mere orchestrations, each one lasted several times the duration of the originals and expanded each musical gesture into a further dimension. Boulez was still working on these new Notations in 2012, just a few years before

his death.

Despite this longevity, many features of the Twelve Notations are very much of their time. Boulez had recently been exposed to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, in which the pitches of a composition are based on a tone row that uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale exactly once; creating or choosing the tone row behind the work is therefore of prime creative importance. Boulez uses a twelve-tone row in Twelve Notations, although not rigidly; the order of its pitches emphasizes the interval of the perfect fifth, providing a sonority to bind together the twelve short movements. According to Boulez, “Back then, twelve was a sacred number.” His numerological preoccupation is also reflected in their length: each Notation is twelve bars long.

But Boulez was not only interested in twelve-tone music; he had also been deep in the study of counterpoint with Andrée Vaurabourg—a French pianist and wife of composer Arthur Honegger. The Notations frequently show a preoccupation with the relationships between musical lines that is most audible in the third Notation. Although his audition to study piano at the Paris Conservatoire was unsuccessful, his personal relationship with the instrument still comes to the fore; it is possible to hear the first Notation, with its freer character, as the composer improvising at the piano, and the second as an exploration of its sonic capabilities.

The fourth Notation, with its unpredictably repeating left-hand ostinato, shows the influence of other contemporary composers such as Bartók. But the fifth, seventh, and eleventh demonstrate the continued impact of his teacher Messiaen with their harmonic warmth and their responsiveness to the maxim that “melody is the point of departure. May it remain sovereign!”

Boulez had been playing and studying Balinese gamelan music, and its sounds are reflected in the pieces—in the interlocking patterns of the eighth notation, the gong-like rumbles of the ninth, and the complex ringing chords of the twelfth. But in the sixth and tenth, the beginnings of Boulez’s mature style—crackling with energy and precision—come into sharp focus. — © Joel Rust

Claude Debussy

from 12 Études, L. 136

When Pierre Boulez began his influential series of courses at the Basel Academy of Music in 1960, he focused on Claude Debussy’s Études alongside music by Anton Webern. No score in his personal library contains more detailed annotation by Boulez than his personal copy of this work from late in his predecessor’s career—a new book by musicologist Peter O’Hagan notes “a surprising amount of attention” given to “the rhythmic aspects” of Étude no. 11.

The year 1915 marked a dark and uncertain period for Debussy, who was devastated by the destruction of the First World War; he grieved the death of his mother in March and faced the grim reality of his own cancer diagnosis. Yet he experienced an unexpected creative resurgence that bore fruit in a cluster of late works, including a series of a dozen études for solo piano. This striking coda to Debussy’s piano music shows the regenerating influence of his recent work preparing a new edition of Chopin’s own piano works for his publisher.

While cast as technical studies, these pieces transcend their surface challenges, allowing Debussy to explore musical poetry at an advanced level—as Chopin, to whose memory Debussy dedicated his collection, had done in his own études. Debussy divided these twelve pieces into two volumes. The first volume involves challenges of technique spotlighting particular intervals—such as the interval of the fourth in the third étude, Pour les quartes; here austere, antique-sounding contours make room for surprising contrasts.

The second volume shifts attention to cultivating idiomatic keyboard playing when addressing such figurations as scales, chords, and arpeggios. It begins with Pour les degrés chromatiques (“For Chromatic Degrees”), in which Debussy uses perpetual-motion figures to spoof the mindless routine of old-fashioned keyboard exercises. The skittish chromatic runs suggest a scherzo mood, although a melancholy melody steals in via the left hand to foil the joke.

The spirit of Chopin recognizably emerges in Pour les sonorités opposées (“For Contrasting Sonorities”), the poetic center of the second volume. At the same time this piece conveys Debussy’s radical philosophy of piano sonority: texture-as-substance. The connections between the keyboard and the performer’s body and sensibility are the real issue here; Paul Roberts marks the “perspectives and layers of sound governed by touch and pedal, heard by the inner ear the moment before execution.”

For Pour les arpèges composés (“For Composite Arpeggios”)—the study on which Boulez fixated with such detail—the pianist is directed to play seductively (lusingando), exploring conjunctions among resonance, dynamics, tempo, and the horizontal unfolding of the musical line. — © Thomas May

Pierre Boulez

Piano Sonata No. 1

Boulez began writing his First Piano Sonata soon after the first performance of Twelve Notations, but the creation of the work followed a longer trajectory. Boulez himself performed the work in a private concert in late 1946, but revised it significantly before its public premiere in 1947 and again in 1949.

Boulez said that a reason for the miniature form of Notations was that he “couldn’t master long works.” The Sonata is hardly a long work, but its two movements are each much longer than any of the Notations; Boulez was devising new structures and techniques to sustain the energy in his compositions over longer periods of time. Here he devised the twelve-tone row so that the first four notes and the last four followed the same pattern. This meant that when using versions of the tone row at different transpositions, he could overlap them to create a more continuous outpouring of musical material, which suited his increasingly extroverted style.

The first movement demonstrates a newly flexible approach to rhythm. Following his teacher Messiaen’s transformation of rhythmic durations by augmentation and diminution drawn from Indian music, Boulez is able to show off his characteristically explosive gestures in a variety of different lights. The second movement gets its structure by contrasting more rigidly rhythmic sections with freer material. Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s approach to the latter, with its focus on the resonance and tone color of the piano, emphasizes the debt Boulez owes to his compatriots Debussy and Ravel. — © Joel Rust

Arnold Schoenberg

Five Piano Pieces, op. 23

The completion of Arnold Schoenberg’s Fünf Klavierstücke, or Five Piano Pieces, in 1923 marked a turning point in his career as a composer. For several years he had already been writing atonal music—that is, music in which no single pitch seems to govern the harmonic fabric of a work as its tonal center. Before 1923 Schoenberg accomplished this primarily by attempting to suffuse his melodies and harmonies with each of the twelve pitches. But in the last of the five pieces of this collection, the waltz, Schoenberg made a key advancement. For the first time, he used a tone row—a specific ordering of the twelve pitches that serves, in a sense, as the presiding scale of the work. The tone row in a twelve-tone piece serves as a compositional tool for generating specific melodic and harmonic gestures. In this twelve-tone piece, large expressive leaps cavort over a fluid waltz-like rhythmic background.

Not to allow the waltz’s special place in music history to overshadow the remainder of the work, though, the other four atonal (but not twelve-tone) pieces are remarkable studies on their own. The first movement opens with a slow, song-like section that leads to a mysterious, staccato-heavy middle section and an agitated push to the conclusion. Fast ascending gestures characterize the brief but thrilling second movement, which fades at the end as if from overexertion. The dance-like third and colorful fourth movements precede the twelve-tone “waltz” that concludes the collection.

— © Matthew Mugmon

Pierre Boulez

Incises

After an early flurry of music for piano concluded with the Third Piano Sonata (which reached its final, if incomplete, form in 1963), Boulez did not write any solo music for the instrument until Incises (Interpolations), composed in 1994–2001. In the meantime he had become renowned as a conductor and an important figure in electronic music through his stewardship of the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM).

He returned to writing for the instrument—his instrument—in response to a request for the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition. While Boulez did not require any encouragement to produce a virtuosic work, this one certainly places great demands on the performer. But Boulez had a longer-term goal in mind. 1996 would be the 90th birthday of his friend Paul Sacher, who through his talent as a conductor (and his immense wealth) was one of the key supporters of new classical music, commissioning composers from Bartók to Birtwistle. An expansion of Incises for nine musicians, sur Incises, would be Boulez’s gift for the occasion.

Incises was written to be the seed of that work, and so Boulez used as its musical material a group of notes derived from Sacher’s name: E-flat (in German usage, “Es”), A, C, B-flat (“H” in German), and D (in the French system, “Re”). This chord is the first sound heard in the piece; flipped upside down, it is the last sound of the piece; and it is the source of much of the music in between.

The piece alternates motoric passages with sections that draw on the piano’s more sustained sonorities. These sustained, warmer sounds are the driving force behind the work; Boulez’s music still crackles with energy, but the energy is gentler by comparison. — © Joel Rust

Olivier Messiaen

4 études de rythme

Created at the very midpoint of the twentieth century, Olivier Messiaen’s 4 études de rythme occupy a pivotal place in postwar musical thought. The second piece in the set, Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (“Mode of Durations and Dynamics”) became especially significant for a generation of young composers who were exploring the serial organization of musical parameters beyond pitch—including for Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Initially a student taking private lessons with Messiaen and then, in 1945, admitted to his advanced harmony class at the Paris Conservatoire, Boulez in particular found here a conceptual breakthrough—even if he proceeded to “teach the master,” as he put it—for his own idea of total serial organization.

In Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, Messiaen organizes a system of thirty-six pitches, twenty-four durations, twelve types of articulation or attack, and seven dynamic levels, conferring on the durations, intensities, and articulations the same structural importance as pitch. The combination of these modes produces shifting colors of rhythm and tone; the same pitch can carry a different rhythmic value, articulation, and intensity influencing the temporal, phonetic, and expressive contour of the piece.

Mode de valeurs et d’intensités was preceded by Neumes rythmiques (Rhythmic Neumes)—both pieces dating from 1949 and presented in score form at that year’s Darmstadt Summer Courses, which would soon become an epicenter for Europe’s postwar musical avant-garde. Neumes are the medieval precursors to modern musical notation, in which abstract symbols served to indicate patterns of pitch or rhythm, especially in plainchant. Messiaen reimagines these symbols as applying to rhythmic patterns, to each of which he assigns “a fixed dynamic and resonances of shimmering colors, more or less bright or somber, always contrasting.” The étude alternates brief refrains similar to a chorus with longer strophes that expand incrementally with each recurrence.

Rhythm was central to Messiaen’s thought, and nature was an inexhaustible source of material for his rhythmic experimentation—most famously, through the abundance of bird song, which sensitized him to the free, asymmetrical patterns that are characteristic of his music. He also drew voraciously on Classical Greek meter and Hindu rhythms, the sonorities of the Indonesian gamelan and contemporary electronic instruments, and mathematics. He developed elaborate theories of rhythm in which certain rhythmic groups were envisioned as characters on a stage.

This sense of rhythm is especially vivid in the two études that frame the collection: Île de feu I and Île de feu II (Island of Fire I and II). Inspired by Messiaen’s fascination with mythic cosmologies from Papua New Guinea—encountered through ethnographic writings; he never visited the region—the Île de feu pieces erupt with volatile energy and fragmented gestures. These études are not melodic in the traditional sense; rather, they unfold as collisions of registral extremes, jagged rhythms, and sharply etched textures, which Messiaen described as being shaped “by the violence of the magic rites of this country.”

The volcanic opening of the first Île de feu étude finds its echo in the second, each interrupted by episodes that intervene between appearances of the refrain. Yet Île de feu II operates on a heightened level of structural complexity and technical challenge, systematically permuting durations, pitches, attacks, and intensities. The étude culminates in a frenzy of swirling, perpetual motion, with the hands crossing over in rapid bursts of rhythmic excitation. — © Thomas May

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the recipient of the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and the Leonie Sonning Music Prize. Widely acclaimed as an authority on the music of our time, he has collaborated with leading composers including Helmut Lachenmann, Elliott Carter, Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marco Stroppa, and Olivier Messiaen. In 2024–25 Pierre-Laurent celebrates the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel with ensembles such as Bern Symphony, Teatro alla Scala Orchestra, SWR Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Czech Philharmonic. He marks the centenary of his teacher and close friend Pierre Boulez by appearing as a soloist with HR Symphony Frankfurt, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and LA Philharmonic, and in recital at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Vienna Musikverein, Auditorium National de Lyon, Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical in Madrid, and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. Other highlights of 2024–25 have included the late Peter Eotvös’ Cziffra Psodia with Berlin Philharmonic, world premieres of works by Mark Andre and George Benjamin, appearances with Tamara Stefanovich in Leipzig and Zurich, and a performance with actor Mathieu Amalric at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Aimard features prominently throughout the season at festivals including Musikfestspiel Berlin, Prague Spring Festival, and Klavierfestival Ruhr. His recital schedule includes Cité de la Musique in Paris, Amsterdam Muziekgebouw, Seoul Arts Centre, Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan, Konzerthaus Dortmund, and Alte Oper Frankfurt. In late 2024 Aimard released Schubert: Ländler, the latest in a series of critically acclaimed albums that also features Messiaen’s magnum opus Catalogue d’oiseaux (2018).