Pierre-Laurent Aimard II

When Pierre-Laurent Aimard was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2017, the “Nobel Prize of music”, he was praised as a “pivotal figure in the international musical life of our time” – as a pianist who “makes light and colours, everything that he plays, clear and vivid.” To mark the double jubilee of Ives and Schönberg, whose 150th anniversaries the musical world celebrates this year, Aimard will perform Schönberg’s complete works for solo piano: starting with the atonal Three Piano Pieces op. 11, that are still based on a piano sound that does not go beyond the boundaries set by Schumann and Brahms, and culminating with the strictly dodecaphonic works op. 25 and 33. The programme after the interval consists of probably the most monumental piano sonata of the 20th century: Charles Ives’s “Concord Sonata”, whose world premiere in 1939 helped to establish the composer who until that point was still largely unknown. As Ives explained in his commentary “Essay Before a Sonata”, the intellectual world of this piece, which is ludicrously demanding in technical terms and whose compelling flood of sound requires three systems of notation rather than two, is set in the community of American transcendalism that reached its zenith in the small New England town of Concord, Massachusetts between 1840 and 1860. Schönberg knew and admired the music of his American colleague: “In this country,” he acknowledged in 1947, “there is an important man – a composer. […] He is not obliged to accept praise or censure. His name is Ives.”