By STUART ISACOFF
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, 55, has the uncanny ability of seeming to be everywhere at once. One moment the French pianist is performing as an artist-in-residence at Carnegie Hall, the next he is doing the same at Vienna's Konzerthaus or Paris's Cité de la Musique, all the while fulfilling his responsibilities as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In between he will play concerts world-wide and turn out recordings as effortlessly as if they were the proverbial hotcakes.
The role of artistic director comes naturally to him. Mr. Aimard is celebrated not only for his virtuosity, but also for a brilliant, restless creativity that can shine a spotlight on the hidden connections between complex layers of rhythms in a 21st-century piece by György Ligeti and time experiments in an 18th-century symphony of Joseph Haydn.
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Fred HarperPierre-Laurent Aimard
His love of contemporary music was cultivated in associations with composers like Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez (Mr. Aimard was a founding member of the latter's Ensemble InterContemporain). But he is equally gifted in the standard repertoire, and in this 150th anniversary year of Claude Debussy, it's no surprise that his latest recording features both books of that composer's Preludes. He performs Book II at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.
As one of a group of Parisians living at the turn of the 20th century who revolutionized the arts by seeking to merge poetry, color, music and even fragrance into a single sensual ideal, Debussy radically changed ideas of how the piano could be played. His new aesthetic demanded an unprecedented range of nuance—he even spoke of a piano that sounded as if it had no hammers. "But it was a sweet revolution—not a coup, like Stravinsky's 'Sacre du Printemps,'" Mr. Aimard says. "He simply slipped gently into another world of sounds. The sonorities in this music are at the center of everything. But they don't exist only for themselves—they evoke lived experiences."
For that reason, he says, it is important to recognize the incredible variety of sounds conveyed. We tend to think of Debussy as the sensual dreamer, for example. "He was himself a sensual person, and you can feel it in his music," agrees Mr. Aimard. "But there is more to him. He tries to do two things: first, to render in music the idea expressed by Baudelaire when he wrote that sounds and fragrances swirled together in the night air. He achieves that with those almost too-full gorgeous harmonies—they are almost too rich. But, second, he uses form in an extremely subtle way—he works in spirals."
Indeed, musicologists have detected evidence of spiral-like mathematical structures in this music, related to the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Mean. "This should give a performer pause," says the pianist. "The score always seems perfectly natural—like his written manuscripts, which are fluid and perfect. And when you play it, the music seems to be floating, in a free discourse. So you think you can take a lot of freedom with it. Then, when you try it, you realize that freedom can actually bring the piece to the point of collapse. You have to find a new sense of order. So thinking about the proportions helps you to get the marvelous unity of the piece.
"There is a solidity to the structure. But with Debussy, you don't notice the technical craftsmanship, or feel the weight of the architecture, as you do, for example, with Bartók, where the calculations are obvious."
What does it take to be a Debussy pianist? "That's a hard question," Mr. Aimard replies. "I think it requires, first of all, an open-mindedness. Debussy is often seen as having one identity, but in the piano cycles each piece is different and specific. Of course, one should have an excellent acoustic imagination, in order to catch the fantasy he has. And finally, it's important to have that sense of structural balance to achieve the perfect order he creates."
Another aspect of great Debussy playing lies in the way the pedals are used. "Mixing the sonorities is crucial. That requires many gradations of pedaling. And let's not forget that the piano Debussy played was very different. It had a richness of timbre, but also more clarity than the modern instrument—with a very defined attack and more transparency. Witnesses to his playing always spoke of both the sweetness of his touch and the precise clarity he achieved. I think the combination is key."
Mr. Aimard also believes it's important to be conscious of Debussy's musical origins. It's easy to point to "impressionist" works by earlier composers as seminal—Franz Liszt's depiction of the fountains of the Villa d'Este come to mind. But Mr. Aimard thinks that Frédéric Chopin was a greater influence. "The delicacy of the sonority, the poetry in all the discoveries, the sweetness of touch—these are all Chopin qualities. And both men shared a tendency toward introversion."
The pianist pointed to some of the individual Preludes he recorded to demonstrate the vastness of Debussy's vision. "Take 'Brouillards' [Mists]," he says. "One might think this is simply an impressionist piece. But it is really like Stravinsky's 'Petroushka'—the left hand plays only white keys, the right hand, black keys. There is a subtle game throughout, and it is almost visual, of one hand hiding the other: The right hand is a mask, covering the left. Debussy loved masks. For a pianist, this piece is physical and full of humor.
"The prelude 'Des pas sur la neige' [Footsteps in the Snow] is completely different. Here, he repeats the same three notes all the time. And they are desolate. We see the abyss of Debussy's darkness, and realize how much he suffered [from his personal struggles]. It is not Germanic in approach—he doesn't give us darkness with great philosophical messages or with great architecture—but with a kind of deep sensuality. This is Debussy the symbolist.
"In 'La puerta del vino' [Mouvement de Habanera], we see Debussy the traveler. He went to Russia and discovered Mussorgsky, was deeply interested in Asia and in Ancient Greece. Some say the best Spanish composers were Debussy and Ravel. As he painted all the different styles, his eye was incredibly accurate. In this piece we see how passionate and extreme he could be. Those who think he should be played in pastels need to examine more fully the game of darkness and light in the music."
His final example is "Feux d'artifice" (Fireworks), the piece that ends Book II of the Preludes. "This piece is not merely suggestive," he contends. "There is lightning. We never know what is coming. There is a sense of spatial proportion—we believe there is an explosion in the distance. He uses four levels of thickness in the texture to achieve that. And he uses humor—quoting 'La Marseillaise,' as if we are hearing the music in open air. In that moment he is like the American Charles Ives."
By noting these aspects of what Debussy accomplished, Mr. Aimard says, we can get a better idea of who the composer was. It is a cause he happily champions. "We can," he says, with typical French optimism, "hear this music with new ears."
Mr. Isacoff's latest book is "A Natural History of the Piano" (Knopf).
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