After more than thirty years, impresario Marco Riaskoff’s series of Master Pianists came to an end in 2020 due to financial problems. The Concertgebouw fills the gap this season with a new series of Great Pianists, in which big names are programmed, despite all the uncertainties and measures. Sunday night played Pierre-Laurent Aimard the awesome cycle Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus van Messiaen in a Great Hall that was at most a quarter full. Nevertheless, the attendees experienced something special.
In catches regards (1944) Messiaen subjects the infancy of Jesus to twenty considerations. The two-hour suite is a tour de force of originality and compositional closeness, organized around a number of themes, of which the ‘God theme’ is the most important. At least as important are the colors that Messiaen saw as a synesthete in his chords and that he was able to describe in detail.
Aimard studied with Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s wife and first performer of the catches regards, he worked closely with the composer and made an authoritative recording of the work of his own in 2000. Compared to Loriod, Aimard is more reserved with rubato, more faithful to the text, while evoking more emphatic color nuances. Live he enhanced this effect: the mystical opening movement, ‘Regard du père’, unfolded tightly on the beat, but with a color palette and delicacy in the note repetitions that made time stand still.
Brilliant was the fifth movement, ‘Regard du fils sur le fils’, in which the stately plush chords of the God theme were answered in the right hand. This thin opposing voice developed into a bird-like chatter that Aimard brought to life in a delightful way – you could hardly hear the piano anymore, but a world of pure sound. Splashing colours, abysmal hammer chords and note cascades thus rain down, culminating in a threefold climax: stormy (18), an intimate tinkling lullaby (19) and then the exhausting eruption of the manic final movement, with Aimard as the singing and sustaining evangelist behind the keyboard. .
Also read this interview with Aimard: ‘Debussy is not allowed in the freezer’