Aimard’s SFP Recital: Fantasias Past and Recent

Pierre-Laurent Aimard with his piano (photograph by Marco Borggreve, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard returned to Herbst Theatre for his third San Francisco Performances (SFP) appearance in a solo recital. His program was a broad survey of the fantasia genre, with the SwWV 261 “Echo” fantasia by the early Baroque Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck at one end of the time line and Elliott Carter’s “Night Fantasies,” composed between November of 1978 and April of 1980 at the other. Aimard coupled these (in chronological order) to begin his program, concluding the first half with the more familiar “Polonaise-Fantaisie”, Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 61 in the key of A-flat major.

The second half was devoted almost entirely to what Charles Rosen called “The Classical Style,” but not in chronological order. The selections were by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the K. 475 fantasia in C minor), Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (the sixth piece in the Wq 59 collection), and Ludwig van Beethoven (the Opus 77 fantasia in G minor). The program concluded with the “punch line” of Charles Ives’ “The Celestial Railroad,” identified as a “Fantasy” in its subtitle.

Aimard was not shy about addressing the audience, and his introductory remarks were as engaging as they were informative. Sweelinck’s “echo” effects were conceived for separate manuals on an organ, but Aimard’s approaches to keyboard touch provided a satisfying contrast between the “source” and “echo” passages. The “classical style” selections were particularly engaging. Aimard introduced K. 475 as a “compact opera for solo piano;” and, in the plethora of themes in Beethoven’s Opus 77, I could swear that one of them had been inspired by Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” in Mozart’s K. 620 opera The Magic Flute. I also appreciated how Aimard cited the “musical independence” of “The Celestial Railroad.”

The only real challenge came from “Night Fantasies.” While one could appreciate that all of the other selections may have emerged from improvisatory explorations, Carter’s composition seemed to be the product of a seriously vast expanse of notes, each of which had been precisely calculated. One could almost call it pointillism in which even the slightest dot carried its own weight of significance. Carter was a Visiting Professor during my senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and I put a prodigious amount of effort in trying to get my head around the music that was performed in a recital at the conclusion of his visit. Several years later I happened to hear his string quartet on the radio and realized how quickly all of those efforts had evaporated.

Ironically, I have encountered “Night Fantasies” several times over the course of my listening history. Most recently, I wrote about it when Pina Napolitano released her Tempo e Tempi album in July of 2020. For all of that exposure, the music never seems to secure a place for itself in long-term memory. Sadly, last night’s impression never rose above the level of any of my previous encounters.

(I should also add that, during one of his MIT lectures, Carter confessed that he had no idea what to make of Ives. I have had a fair exposure to much of Ives music, thanks in some part to Michael Tilson Thomas; and, for me at least, “The Celestial Railroad” was like a walk in the park, even if the park was surreal. “Night Fantasies,” on the other hand, left me figuratively grouping around in the dark!)

The reception for last night’s performance was too enthusiastic for Aimard to avoid taking an encore. He used the occasion to introduce the little known Russian composer Andrei Volkonsky to the audience. HIs Wikipedia page describes him as “a key figure in Early Music Revival in Russia,” and this description was affirmed by Aimard’s encore. He played the third and fourth movements of “Musica Stricta (fantasia ricercata),” the composer’s Opus 11, composed in 1957, which applied twelve-tone syntax to the semantics of that “Early Music” period. This was “something completely different” from the program that Aimard had prepared, but it left me curious about when I would encounter further works by this composer!