To grasp the full scope of Bartók’s piano music, in all its gritty lyricism and angular, percussive splendor, it helps to have an artist on hand like the French keyboard virtuoso Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Sometimes it can even feel indispensable.
This week, Aimard begins a new collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, a live recording project devoted to the composer’s three piano concertos. If the team’s opening salvo — a brilliant rendition of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, June 16 — is anything to go by, the result promises to be a powerful addition to the orchestra’s already long and important award-winning discography.
Aimard, and particularly his distinctive gift for the craggier corners of the piano repertoire, is the key to this undertaking. He’s a performer of obvious technical prowess, who throws himself into the virtuoso aspects of a work without letting it crowd out other elements. He boasts a keyboard touch that is somehow both steely and delicate, like an iron fist inside a velvet glove.
What I love most about Aimard’s playing, though, is his ability to make a listener rethink notions of dissonance, complexity and rhetorical directness. He excels in music where these concerns are paramount, including not only the work of such 20th century modernists asPierre BoulezandHarrison Birtwistle, but Beethoven’s late music as well.
To listen to Aimard in action is to feel the gears of a composition mesh in new ways. It’s to hear the urgency and beauty in music that might otherwise sound grating or remote.
These issues aren’t necessarily uppermost in connection with Bartók’s writing — a century of exposure has taught us a lot about how to listen to his work — but they aren’t irrelevant either. The Piano Concerto No. 1, written in 1926, is especially a piece whose rhythmic intricacies and aggressive harmonic language retain their power to startle. (After one more performance of the First on Friday, June 17, Aimard and the orchestra plan to switch to Bartók’s more overtly ingratiating Piano Concerto No. 3 for the two final concerts.)
Like so many composer-pianists, Bartók was writing music for himself to play, and the keyboard style on display here boasts a ferocious, hard-edged grandeur. The opening movement bristles with gnarled textural effects, including the use of tone clusters (groups of adjacent notes played simultaneously), which he seems to have borrowed from the American experimentalist Henry Cowell.
缓慢的运动是一个怪异的,稀疏的事情,雷米niscent of the “night music” movements that often pop up in the composer’s music, and the finale plows forward with the pianist pounding away at top speed. Salonen shares with Aimard the ability to bring out the expressive power of these sharp corners.
The result was little short of thrilling.
As a strange sort of counterweight, Salonen concluded the program with “Pines of Rome,” Ottorino Respighi’s gooey, gleaming four-movement paean to Italian nationalism (one might even say protofascism).
It’s impossible to resist the sinuous beauty of the work’s two central movements, especially given Salonen’s fluid phrasing and the limpid charm of principal clarinetist Carey Bell’s solo in the third movement. But it can be equally hard to stomach the garish opening movement or the militaristic finale, in which gleaming ranks of brass — both onstage and in the rear balcony — try to remind us of the glories of the Roman Empire.
交替与这些强壮的产品,比如帮助ings of sorbet in between the main courses, were two short, appealing entertainments. Jessie Montgomery’s “Strum,” an orchestral adaptation of her 2006 string quintet, uses plucked strings as a thematic punctuation mark amid flurries of appealing melody.
Luciano Berio’s 1975 treatment of “Ritirata Notturna di Madrid” by the 18th century composer Luigi Boccherini — in which Berio superimposes four versions of the original material to produce something like a multiple-exposure photograph — made a delightful opener.
But it was Bartók’s work that left the deepest impression. The complete cycle, when it finally arrives (Piano Concerto No. 2 is scheduled for next season), should be something to look forward to.
San Francisco Symphony:7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, June 17-18; 2 p.m. Sunday, June 19. $20-$85. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000.www.sfsymphony.org