Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, review: An extraordinary performance of Ligeti's Etudes

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

György Ligeti’s piano études stretched the limits of what it was thought technically possible for a human – as opposed to a machine – to play. Yet the spur for their creation was his own inadequate piano technique.

He drew a parallel with Cezanne’s trouble with perspective: the apples and pears in the painter’s still-lifes seemed perpetually on the point of rolling away, and his table-cloths had the rigidly of plaster models. “But what wonders Cezanne accomplished with his harmonies of colour,” Ligeti wrote, “with his emotionally-charged geometry, with his curves, volumes, and weight-displacements! That’s what I would like to achieve: the transformation of inadequacy into professionalism.”

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is one of the very few pianists who can satisfactorily deliver these works – indeed, some of them were composed with him in mind – so to hear him play 18 of them live was a rare bonus.

Ligeti asserted that these compositions were neither tonal nor atonal, neither avant-garde nor traditional, and in no way postmodern. They proceeded from a very simple core idea, and led from simplicity to great complexity: “They behave like growing organisms,” he said.

I once asked Aimard how he approached these dense clouds of notes. “You have to use controls quite different from the traditional ones you use for the voices of a Bach fugue,” he replied. Were those controls in the brain, or the fingers? “They are both in the brain and in the physical contact. You have to find a synthesis.” But when he played, did he watch the score, or his fingers? “It depends on the étude – with some pieces I keep a very careful eye on the score.”

All of which made the sudden slide into a heap of the loose pages his assistant was turning for him at the QEH – negotiated without missing a beat – all the more remarkable. This was an extraordinary – and extraordinarily fast – performance.