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Pierre-Laurent
Aimard
Cambridge
West Road Concert Hall 19 June
61st Aldeburgh Festival
Snape Maltings Concert Hall 14 June
Recorded live for broadcast
on BBC Radio 3, Pierre-Laurent Aimard had the following to say on this
project and working with Britten Sinfonia:
'It has been extremely nice,
very inspiring to work with Britten Sinfonia. The atmosphere is perfect,
it's alive but concentrated, it's respectful for music but friendly. It's
really all that makes a nice collective work. I've been immensely happy
to spend these days of rehearsal and concerts with them.' Pierre-Laurent
Aimard in an interview for BBC Radio 3.
The
Guardian Four Stars ****
Erica Jeal THursday
19 June 2008
After an underwhelming first
night, the Aldeburgh festival was back on track. Saturday morning had
Aldeburgh church reverberating with some of Byrd's rarer motets, Robert
Hollingsworth leading I Fagiolini in a programme that threw fascinating
light on the composer as a daringly subversive Catholic in Protestant
Elizabethan England.
Sunday afternoon brought Robert
Holl and pianist Rudolf Jansen to Blythburgh's airy church for a sombre
but hugely rewarding all-Schubert programme. Over in Snape Maltings, the
evening concerts showcased the incoming and outgoing artistic directors.
On Saturday Britten
Sinfonia was directed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a clear leader
and expressive soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No 26. Before this came
a sequence of little masterpieces by Schoenberg, Webern and Ives framing
two barely moving miniatures by featured composer György Kurtág.
Sunday's Birmingham Contemporary
Music Group concert was directed by Thomas Adès, and included his
own Living Toys as well as Gerald Barry's Beethoven, which sets three
of the composer's letters to his "Immortal Beloved" and makes
him sound like an old fool. This seemed leaden after Ligeti's mischievous
With Pipes, Drums and Reed Fiddles, in a bravura performance from its
creator, mezzo Katalin Károlyi, and the BCMG's four percussionists.
Kurtag was at
the heart of the programme, and the 21 songs, some only seconds long,
that make up his Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova were given emotional
edge by soprano Natalia Zagorinskaia. The 82-year-old composer insisted
on shaking every member of the ensemble by the hand.
Local
Secrets
Mike Levy 22 June 2008
Britten Sinfonia: Nothing is predictable
"There's nothing predictable about a Britten Sinfonia concert".
So said a member of the West Road audience after hearing an astonishing
first half of classical and modernist music.
Actually she was wrong; there
are two very predictable things about this orchestra: that the standard
of musicianship will be world class and that the concert will be highly
subversive. This concert was no exception to the Britten's rule. Subversion
was indeed a running theme of the whole evening. Instead of the usual
(and usually predictable) structure of Overture, Concerto and Big Symphony
we got something much more challenging.
Under the hands of conductor/pianist
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the evening began with a blisteringly vivid account
of Haydn's 22nd Symphony, itself a revolutionary work that audibly spans
the divide between 18th century baroque and the great classical movement
to come. As ever, the playing was as bright as newly minted Austrian shilling
packed with Haydn's joyous energy and rattling good humour (even providing
a laugh from the audience at the end of one movement). I loved the rendition
so much that I am racing out straight after writing this review to buy
a CD of the work.
Next came a series of astonishing
modernist miniatures. First off was Schoenberg's 3-minute work Three Pieces
for Orchestra played with a beautiful sense of balance and vivid colouring.
Next was the same composer's highly expressive Six Little Pieces for Piano
with the conductor at the keyboard. The feast continued with two highly
dramatic works by the living Hungarian composer Kurtag - his Ligatura
with its spine-tingling duet for cellos and off-stage string accompaniment
had the audience on the edge of their seats. Webern followed: his Five
Movements Op 5. This composer has the reputation for aridity but here
the orchestra excelled in making this 'modern music' (99 years old!) sound
accessible with its breathtaking shifts in tone, volume and pace. It is
like some bottled-up furious genie let out of a fragile bottle.
The first half ended with one
of the great modernist tours de force: The Unanswered Question by Charles
Ives. With its offstage mournful trumpet melody answered (or not) by an
ever-more demented wind quintet (fabulous playing here) against the background
of an offstage string accompaniment refusing to be roused, the whole effect
is dreamily hypnotic. What a brave and unusual way to end a first half
- it silenced the audience and had us ruminating darkly into our glasses
of wine.
The second half had but one
work; not a symphony but against all usual trends, a piano concerto: Mozart's
No 26 in D Major. With Almard conducting again from the piano (he certainly
earned his fee that night) the prominence of the work brought the Mozart
into a new light: here was a big, bold and in its day subversive work
- nothing sweet of chocolate-boxey about this piece. It was so refreshing
to give so much attention to this wonderful work. As usual it was played
with astonishing vigour, pin-sharp turn-on-a-farthing precision and bags
of the band's signal good-humoured enthusiasm.
The
Telegraph
Ivan Hewett 18 June
2008
Britten Sinfonia and
the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group at the Aldeburgh Festival
That brilliant composer and
pianist Thomas Adès has always had the world at his feet, and as
a result he's never found it difficult to look his seniors in the eye.
But there's one living composer
who inspires something like awe in Adès: the 82-year-old Hungarian
composer György Kurtág.
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As these concerts made clear, it's an attraction of opposites. Adès's
music rushes on, arms outstretched, almost tripping over itself in its
hurry to pile on one complication after another. Kurtág's music
goes the other way, paring down its own substance, searching for an essence
in a single note or gesture.
For his last season as festival
director Adès has made a feature of Kurtág's music, and
has invited the great man over to witness it. That's a generous gesture,
but also risky. Kurtág is a famously severe critic of his performers,
and has been known to cancel starry performances at the last minute because
he wasn't happy.
Another problem is how to programme
such hard, gem-like pieces, without making the music around them seem
splashy and indulgent. The Saturday night concert given by the Britten
Sinfonia found an ingenious solution: embed Kurtág's gems in a
series of miniatures as focused and brilliant as his own.
We heard three tiny and rarely-played
chamber pieces by Arnold Schoenberg, Ives's Unanswered Question (what
a magical moment this was, the offstage trumpet dropping its repeated
"question" into the air, the strings on-stage continuing unperturbed),
and as a bonus, the Six Little Pieces by Schoenberg. These were exquisitely
played by French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who also directed the
orchestra.
Everything had an uncanny brilliance
- even Haydn's mysterious 22nd Symphony, which opened the concert, sounded
like a cubist abstraction.
The Sunday concert from the
Bimingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Adès started in
the same gnomic vein, with György Ligeti's setting of Hungarian nonsense
poems. But then the evening was let off the leash, with Gerald Barry's
naively impassioned setting of Beethoven's letter to his Immortal Beloved,
beautifully caught by the ensemble and bass Stephen Richardson. Adès's
own Living Toys was made to seem even more brilliant than ever.
But the highlight was Kurtág's
own Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova, a tale of a woman's frustrated
passion recounted with spell-binding intensity by Hungarian soprano Katalin
Károlyi.
Afterwards Kurtág came
on stage, all smiles, and shook every player's hand, while Adès
stood bashfully to one side. It was a touching moment.
The Financial Times
Richard Fairman June
15 2008
Festival both fair
and foul
A unique selling point about
Aldeburgh is that it is a wonderful place to be, no matter if the weather
is fair or foul. If the sun is shining, the wide sea vista gleams with
a brilliance few places can rival. If the east coast does its worst, the
scudding black clouds and biting winds conjure a Peter Grimes atmosphere
that is what this town, forever associated with Benjamin Britten, is all
about.
The same might be said of the
festival. The 61st Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts opened at
the weekend with events fair and – well, if not foul, certainly
nothing like as good as one might have hoped. But even if one performance
disappoints, there are others in the very wide range of music on offer
that soon deliver compensation.
The fairest was Saturday evening’s
concert at Snape Maltings – an important event, symbolic of the
forthcoming change of leadership at Aldeburgh. After 10 years this is
Thomas Adès’s last festival as artistic director. He will
shortly hand over the baton to Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who has suddenly
become an omnipresent force in the UK’s musical life. In spite of
having other jobs, it seems Aimard could not wait to start at Aldeburgh,
as he has three appearances booked for this opening week.
At Saturday’s concert
with the Britten Sinfonia, Aimard was both pianist and conductor. The
composer in residence at this year’s festival is György Kurtág,
now the grand old man of Hungarian music, and this first orchestral programme
was devised to introduce him. Kurtág is a pithy communicator who
never writes 10 notes if two will do and it was a clever idea to gather
a pair of his short pieces in a bundle of miniatures by 20th-century composers
and wrap the lot in classical packaging by Haydn and Mozart.
Works such as Schoenberg’s
Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra and Webern’s Fünf Sätze
Op.5 do not fit in standard concert programmes easily, but here their
pinpoint sensitivity to the minutest sound could be appreciated in context.
The two Kurtág pieces were equally precise, but experiment with
sounds flung across wide spaces. His Ligatura – Message to Frances-Marie,
subtitled The Answered Unanswered Question, has five instruments calling
across a cosmic void, proposing a possible solution to Ives’s The
Unanswered Question, itself heard shortly after. At either end of the
evening Aimard conducted a buoyant Haydn Symphony No.22 and was soloist
in a darker than usual performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in
D, K.537.
That is the sort of imaginative
concert that Aldeburgh does so well. It would certainly have made a better
start to the festival that the actual first night on Friday, when we were
given the premiere of An Ocean of Rain, pictured left, a new opera by
Yannis Kyriakides. The composer and his librettist, Daniel Danis, have
taken a simple story about a prostitute in Haiti who witnesses the murder
of a client and tried to turn it into a mind-blowing tale fusing the past
and the future, the living and the dead – but the result rapidly
descends into an incomprehensible jumble of ideas.
Danis says his inspiration
was an “awareness of the spherical polyphony of our perceptions
of time and humanity” – a warning sign flashing red, if ever
there was one. There is not much polyphony in Kyriakides’s score,
or even much music at times, though putting an electric guitar, an Indian
harmonium and electronics into a small band of instrumentalists is bound
to throw up some interesting sonorities. It did not help that Claire Prempeh,
who played the prostitute, spent most of the evening relegated to the
back of the stage shouting unintelligibly into a microphone. The roles
of three visiting cosmopolitan women brought some passages of lyrical
grace, gratefully received. Otherwise, An Ocean of Rain made a depressingly
damp, drizzly start.
Some balm came the next morning
with a concert of sacred music by Byrd in Aldeburgh Church. The main work
was Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, set in a reconstruction of a full
Mass for the Feast of St Peter and St Paul as it might have been heard
in the 1590s. Although the six voices of I Fagiolini are not of equal
quality, their performances were alive to the richness of this inspiring
music. As the audience came out into the midday sunshine, everything seemed
well with the festival again.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
The
Times
Geoff Brown 18 June
2008 **** Four stars
Aldeburgh Festival
at the Maltings
On Saturday night at the Maltings the air buzzed. There was scarcely a
spare seat. For this Britten Sinfonia concert gave us
a tantalising preview of the Aldeburgh Festival's future under its next
artistic director, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Not for him, or
Britten Sinfonia, a concert shaped like a string of sausages. Instead
we were taken on a questing journey. Primed by the restless imagination
of Haydn (Symphony No 22), we leapt into gnomic 20th-century miniatures,
adrift in space and time. Mysterious slivers of György Kurtág
followed expressionist slices of Schoenberg. Webern's Op 5 pieces, arranged
for string orchestra, muddied progress a bit. But nothing stopped Ives's
The Unanswered Question sounding thrillingly strange. Mozart's Coronation
piano concerto, after the interval, was sprightly and elegant, though
it came as an anticlimax after this visionary first half.
More traditional programming
still flourishes at the festival. I Fagiolini's William Byrd programme
on Saturday was intelligently designed. If the singers proved more decent
than incandescent, the atmosphere of Aldeburgh's parish church kept spirits
soaring.
No assistance was necessary
on Sunday at Blythburgh Church, when the Dutch baritone Robert Holl delivered
a Schubert programme with such natural force and passion that resistance
was impossible. Singing about the “deep grave” in Totengräbers
Heimwehe (“Gravedigger's Lament”), Holl's mouth seemed the
grave itself. And in we jumped, safe in the power and resonance of this
humane voice, rooted deep within his body. He was quite an experience.
So in his quiet way was the pianist Rudolf Jansen, as subtle an accompanist
as you could find.
After that, layers of the audience
melted away. Perhaps they were hiding from Thomas Adès's concert
with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. A pity, for Ligeti's With
Pipes, Drums and Reed Fiddles, with the mezzo Katalin Károlyi,
offered nothing but fun, and Adès's brilliant Living Toys danced
with wit. The purpose of Gerald Barry's Beethoven stayed opaque, as it
did at its premiere, but it sounded well in the Maltings resonance.
So did the soprano Natalia
Zagorinskaia in Kurtág's milestone piece, Messages of the Late
Miss R. V. Troussova, as cryptic and secretive as ever. At the end, the
beaming composer shook hands with every musician. My sentiments exactly.
The
Independent
Lynne Walker 17 June
2008
An Ocean of Rain/Opening
Concerts, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings
When the six instrumentalists of the Dutch Ensemble MAE leapt to their
feet, dashing their stands and music to the ground, there was a frisson
at the world premiere of An Ocean of Rain. Had the players decided that
enough was enough? Alas not, since this worthy piece of music drama has
at least three possible endings, along with three pillars of plot ("wave"
moments), three "time" strands (divided between the here-and-now
and the afterlife) and three women getting back in touch with their inner
selves (involving, in the case of two of them, a somewhat superfluous
lesbian affair).
An Ocean of Rain, which opened the 61st Aldeburgh Festival, is a co-production
between London's Almeida Theatre, Aldeburgh and the Glasgow-based Cryptic.
The several threads of story, to a libretto by the French-Canadian Daniel
Danis, introduce an abused prostitute in Haiti called Kiev, whose desperation
to return to the safety of the orphanage in which she once lived drives
her to self-immolation. Three liberated females – named New York,
Cairo and Kyoto, possibly after a series of international agreements –
have come to Haiti to help out in this very orphanage, run by Sister Delhi.
With the exception of Kiev (a speaking role), the singing members of the
all-female cast of six are, or could be, ghosts or even hallucinations.
They do, in fact, die in a tsunami but not until well in to the piece.
So far, so confusing.
The music, something of a patchwork
by the Anglo-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides, is scored for a curious
line-up of recorders, violin, double bass and electric guitar, with the
addition of a sepulchral trombone and Indian harmonium. There's a prominent
electronic element and an ambient soundscape featuring the voices of the
orphanage children (as Scottish in accent, inexplicably, as Jean Brodie's
girls at play), snatches of Creole dance music on radio, beating rain
and swishing surf. Video projections by Julia Bardsley enhance a rather
minimalist visual experience in what is, in effect, a semi-staging (the
instrumentalists integrated among the actors) dominated by the impenetrable
metal gates of the orphanage.
Director Cathie Boyd may have
experienced Haitian culture first-hand, including a seven-hour voodoo
ceremony, but with such an unfocused storyline, divided into 30 short
scenes mixing abstract and concrete, memory and reality, there was nothing
that the valiant little cast could do to inject some much-needed dramatic
structure and musical purpose and pace into this ill-conceived piece.
Should the festival's artistic
director, Thomas Adès, not have exerted some quality control when
he saw how the project was turning out? He may have had other things on
his mind, given that he failed to complete the commission promised for
his final festival as cultural figurehead. Appearing with Birmingham Contemporary
Music Group in a concert of his own music and that of one of the Festival's
featured composers, György Kurtág, Adès conducted the
second performance of Gerald Barry's vocal scena Beethoven. A setting
of three of the composer's letters to his "Immortal Beloved",
Barry's brilliantly imaginative score not only captures the mercurial
temperament of the composer, but – as demonstrated in a virtuoso
performance by Stephen Richardson, whose voice stretched from basso profundo
to falsetto – his frustrated passions and self-deprecatory wit as
well.
The previous evening, the festival's
artistic director-in-waiting, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, both
played with and conducted the Britten Sinfonia in an
uninterrupted sequence of pieces by Webern and Kurtág miniatures,
framed by Schoenberg and Ives (The Unanswered Question). It was a fascinating
juxtaposition of musical expressions, all the more so for coming between
a spirited account of Haydn's Symphony No 22 and a bluffly buoyant performance
of Mozart's "Coronation" Piano Concerto.
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