For his own opening concert at this year's Aldeburgh Festival, the new artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard devised a musical entertainment which he entitled Collage-Montage. The idea was simple enough: take some very different composers and juxtapose their music so that we, the audience, hear the differences and the connections. Or as Aimard himself puts it in his introductory programme note: 'the whole thing is a game. A game with different musics (sic) and different musicians. A game that evokes memories and provokes discoveries'.
So just as we have substantive movements of works by Beethoven, Bach, Bartok and Schubert, so we also hear in immediate complement and contrast extracts from Kurtag, Ligeti and Stockhausen – composers with whom Aimard has worked intensively over many years. Does it work? Partly so, and occasionally triumphantly. Is it fun? Yes, enormous fun for performers and audience alike – the sort of musical experimentation that a gifted group of music students might get up to when they let their hair down. But as an organised performance it leaves one slightly hungry for the 'missing bits' – I for one would gladly have heard the Quatuor Diotima play the remainder of Bartok's 5th string quartet for example, and not just the Allegro.
Aimard is French and clearly has intellectual rigour. He grouped the evening into four 'movements', just as in a classical symphony or chamber work. He placed the string quartet downstage right, himself at the piano centre stage middle and the wind quintet downstage left. The first 'movement' bore the title 'Fantasy on a repeated note' and we kicked off with the Allegretto from Beethoven's string quartet opus 59. Indeed it starts with a rhythmically repeated single note, playful, accentuated with a dance-like spring to its step. The lights dimmed on the quartet and shone on the pianist: Aimard gave us two movements from book III of Kurtag's Jatekok – the title gives away that these are games for the piano soloist, the first with a sort of tolling bell in the left hand, the second with a repeated tonic note and ever increasing discords. The spotlights came on to the Haffner Wind Quintet: they gave us two light, airy and short pieces from Ligeti's 10 pieces for wind quintet. And finally back to the Diotima, who finished the first movement with easily the strongest bit of music-making so far: the Allegro from Bartok's 5th quartet.
For the second 'movement', entitled Melody and Memory, string and wind players were regrouped around the piano. The music was Schubert and Stockhausen. Extracts from the latter's Tierkreis of 2007 surrounded five Schubert Landler and one Schubert waltz, the entire movement becoming almost a seamless whole. So remarkably did the key signatures and progressions fit together that I found myself wondering how much montage Aimard had had to do to make the whole thing work: it really did sound congruent. I also found myself wondering whether or not I could hear Schubert in any sort of new light, surrounded as his simple, direct melodies and harmonies were by some of the last music that Stockhausen wrote. I cannot say that I did: but at the interval I must have echoed the village girl to whom Benjamin Britten once gave a ticket for one of his operas and asked her subsequently how she had enjoyed it – 'Oh, I didn't mind it at all'.
For the third 'movement', entitled Scherzo brillante, the ten musicians were spaced widely apart all over the enormous Snape stage. We began conventionally enough with Aimard playing a Sigfrid Karg-Elert piano sonata, but gradually each musician joined in with a solo of his or her own choosing, from Elliott Carter to Paganini to Bernd Alois Zimmermann. And as Naaman Sluchin embarked on the fugue from Bach's 2nd violin sonata, and began to stroll the stage, followed by the other soloists, the musical happening could be said to have arrived! Aimard's vision for this movement was an extension of Charles Ives – the superimposition of layers of music that have no relation to one another. Aimard also enjoined the audience to decide for themselves whether this movement was an experiment or a joke. It will be available on webcast shortly (see below) so those who are interested can indeed decide for themselves.
The fourth and last movement was entitled simply Hommage to Ligeti. After a thunderous piano introduction (if the first 'movement' was all about the repeated note, this was more like the repeated octave, played fortissimo and all over the piano throughout), the musical line ebbed through wind and strings intoa quiet, contemplative, often beautiful collage of sound. This in turn gave way to the final musical joke of the evening – a reduction for ten players of Ligeti's Poeme symphonique for 100 metronomes. Each player picked up a metronome and one by one they started to chime it. The metronomes were pitched differently and each player had his or her own rhythm. The sound swelled as all ten metronomes played, then gradually subsided as player by player dropped out. Haydn's Farewell symphony reimagined? Who knows – but it ended the evening with a smile on everyone's face.
It was an evening of festival fun and perhaps should not be taken too seriously. Most of the composers represented will be back on the bill during the 62nd Aldeburgh Festival and can be heard in their own context, without immediate aural reminders of 'whence they came'. But all the players, and Aimard himself, gave us some top-flight music-making and the audience – including a greater complement of younger visitors than one sometimes sees at Snape – responded with gratified enthusiasm.
By Mike Reynolds
This concert will be webcast on www.aldeburgh.co.uk free of charge for one month from Wednesday 24 June
Related articles:
Opera Review: Britten: The Rape of Lucretia at Snape Maltings
Concert Review: Snape Proms 2: BBC Scottish Symphony/Solyom
Concert Review: Snape Proms 21: NYO/Pappano
Concert Review: Handel's Athalia at the Snape Proms
Join the debate: if you have any comments on this or any of our articles, visit our forum