CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano

BACH Contrapunctus I–XI from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080
SCHOENBERG Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110

Encores:
ELLIOTT CARTER Caténaires
BACH "Contrapunctus Inversus" No. 12a from The Art of Fugue

Program Notes:

By Paul Griffiths

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Contrapunctus I–XI from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080
Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach; died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig.

Composed in the years 1742-9, Bach’s Art of Fugue was first performed at Carnegie Hall in an arrangement by Wolfgang Graeser on March 16, 1931, with the Juilliard Graduate School String Orchestra conducted by Albert Stoessel.

The Art of Fugue, or Die Kunst der Fuge, is one of the great, culminating projects to which Bach devoted his last years: an unprecedented and unrivalled triumph of contrapuntal art taking the form of 14 fugues (for which Bach used the antique term “contrapunctus”) and four canons, all based on the same D-minor subject. Much of the work seems to have been done between 1742 and 1746, after the “Goldberg” Variations and the second book of The Well Tempered Clavier, and before The Musical Offering, with the B-Minor Mass proceeding alongside. Revision and expansion continued until shortly before the composer died, leaving the last fugue unfinished—unless its final page was lost.

The work is unfinished in another sense, in that Bach left no instructions for its realization. He prepared it for publication in open score, i.e., with each of the four parts on a separate staff, which to some has suggested he was thinking in terms of the soundless voices of the mind. However, it cannot be by chance that everything fits two hands at a keyboard. Moreover, there is much in this music—pathos and comedy, intricacy and color, obsessiveness and delight—that calls out for performance. Together with sublime abstraction, The Art of Fugue maintains many other possibilities in counterpoint, for the player and for those who listen.

Bach also did not fully specify an order for the 18 items, though he clearly intended a progression in complexity. Mr. Aimard’s choice of the first 11 fugues can be justified on historical grounds as being close to Bach’s original conception. More importantly, these 11 fugues make a compelling whole, ending with what is, aside from the incomplete Contrapunctus XIV, the work’s most majestic item.

The first four fugues form a group, each introducing the subject in a different register (alto, bass, tenor, soprano, in that order), and each adding something further to the store of contrapuntal devices. As Joseph Kerman points out in his recent book on Bach’s fugues, the achievement of an elementally simple fugue in Contrapunctus I—no countersubjects, no variations, nothing but the pristine theme each time—is itself a feat of creative virtuosity. Contrapunctus II gives the tail of the theme a dotted rhythm, which continues to the end of the piece and goes on to become a feature of the entire composition; thus the work grows, by learning from its own experience, or by expressing its musical genes. Contrapunctus III and IV both invert the theme, so that it starts with a falling fifth instead of a rising one (or fourth, if the harmony so requires), and add a counter-subject—highly chromatic in III and filling the texture with scale patterns in IV.

In the next three fugues, the theme is taken from a variant that appeared in Contrapunctus III. This subject is combined contrapuntally with segments of itself in constant variety, in a technique known as “stretto,” using right-side-up and inverted forms simultaneously. Contrapunctus VI, desribed as being “in the French style” on account of its dotted rhythms and ornamental swirls, adds the complication that the subject also moves at two different speeds, the faster double the slower. In Contrapunctus VII, there is the further complexity of three speeds at the same time, in the ratios 1:2:4.

The last four fugues in the group are fugues with more than one subject, Contrapunctus IX and X being double fugues, VIII and XI triple fugues. Contrapunctus VIII, unusually in three voices, is a big piece, the main theme arriving at a late stage in an inverted form in three-note segments. In Contrapunctus IX, the theme appears in long values in its basic form, unheard since Contrapunctus I. Contrapunctus X has the theme inverted again, and with dotted rhythm. Finally, Contrapunctus XI features inverted forms of the second and third themes from Contrapunctus VIII in reverse order, so that this fugue starts with the work’s main theme again.


ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Five Piano Pieces, Op.23
Born September 13, 1874, in Vienna; died July 13, 1951, in Los Angeles.

Composed in the years 1920–23, Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, were first performed at the Kleiner Musikvereins-saal in Vienna on October 9, 1920, with Eduard Steuermann, piano; they received their first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 22, 1954, with Grete Sultan.

Schoenberg, thoughout his life, composed in bursts separated by stretches of inactivity or faltering, of which the longest began in the summer of 1917, when he stopped advancing on his oratorio Die Jakobsleiter (“Jacob’s Ladder”). The next year he made a couple of brief beginnings on smaller pieces; in 1919 there was nothing. Only in 1920 did he get going again, first in March with substantial sketches for an orchestral passacaglia, then in July with two piano pieces—the first compositions he had finished since 1916—and the start of a third. These were to be Nos. 1, 2, and 4 of the present opus, which was not completed until February 1923. Meanwhile, the composer had taken up two other works: his Serenade, Op. 24, for septet with bass voice, and his Suite, Op. 25, for piano.

The delayed beginning of Op. 23, and then the delayed completion, had several causes. Schoenberg was called up for army service in the fall of 1917; after the war, he was busy with teaching and organizing concerts. But perhaps most important was the growing difficulty he experienced in creating substantial musical forms with the atonal language he had initiated in 1908–09. First there had been a period of creative excitement and release, ending in 1912 with the composition of Pierrot lunaire. After that, and for the next decade, there is a sense in Schoenberg’s music of searching, which one may well feel in Op. 23, where thematic fragments wander or rush without finding full answer or resolution.

For the composer, the end of the search came in the summer of 1921, when he set forth the principles of 12-tone composition—first in a sketch for the finale of Op. 23 dated July 26, 1921. But though this finale, a waltz, has qualities of lightness and charm new to the set, uncertainties endure. What we have may be not so much a waltz as the quest for a waltz, something glimpsed in slipping away.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn; died March 27, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1821, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31 received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 25, 1893, in a performance by Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

In the summer of 1819, Beethoven came to an agreement with the young Moritz Schlesinger, scion of a Berlin music publisher, to supply the firm with three new piano sonatas. They came slowly, for the composer was working at the same time on his Missa solemnis. The first of the three sonatas he finished in 1820; the second, Op. 110, in December the following year; and the last in the year after that. Sketches for the mass are intermixed with those for the sonatas, and certain features are common to both projects—notably fugue, and surprising harmonic shifts that might be explained by the composer’s thinking in terms of the old church modes. Also in the background to the three sonatas of 1820–22 is their great predecessor, the “Hammerklavier,” of 1817–18. These ultimate sonatas are all much shorter and leaner; it is as if the exertion of the “Hammerklavier” has brought Beethoven onto a new plane, which he can now explore more calmly.

The Sonata in A-flat Major opens with an unhurried sonata movement, whose brief introduction presents an idea to be unfolded in the melodious first subject. The varied secondary material, including a passage in which the hands interlock, wanders harmonically before duly settling into the dominant, E-flat. There is no repeat before the development, a harmonic journey through repetitions of the movement’s opening two measures, soon moving into the recapitulation. Quite a lot of this movement has both hands in the treble register, and the weightlessness of sound, coupled with the simplicity of the basic idea, might convey a sense of distance or contingency in the musical narrative. This is how things were, or might have been.

Very short, the second movement is a duple-time scherzo in the relative minor (F minor), with a trio in D-flat major. It might be a gate from the past to the present, or from gentleness, musing, and irony to a more fully engaged kind of expression.

The finale, site of this presence and passion, occupies more than half the Sonata’s length. Its poignant beginning, in B-flat minor, leads into a recitative and arioso, the latter in A-flat minor. This then gives way to a three-part fugue in the sonata’s tonic key, A-flat major, and the movement continues as a dialog between opera house and church. The fugue subject, based on a scale of rising fourths and traceable to the first movement’s introduction, has something of the sturdiness of a chorale; there are connections, too, with fugues in the Missa solemnis. An interrupted cadence provides the opportunity for the arioso to return, now in G minor and, as Beethoven marks it, Ermattet (exhausted). Then the fugue comes back, its subject inverted, so that the fourths stride downward. Beethoven adds the marking “wieder auflebend” (reviving once more), which is what happens. The fugue theme is restored to its upward motion, and the harmony comes swinging back to A-flat major for a coda.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently, A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano
Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and as a leading interpreter of the standard piano repertoire, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career that transcends traditional boundaries.

Mr. Aimard performs throughout the world each season with the major orchestras under conductors including Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, David Robertson, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Franz Welser-Möst. During the 2006–07 season he curated and performed in his own Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, a Carte blanche at the Konzerthaus Vienna, and was pianist-in-residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker. The year 2007 has also featured a ground breaking song and chamber music recital series at the Palais Garnier, Opéra de Paris; and his invitation as artiste étoile at the Lucerne Festival.

This season Mr. Aimard serves as Artistic Director of the Messiaen festival at London’s Southbank Centre and as Artist-in-Residence both for the Mozarteum Salzburg and with The Cleveland Orchestra. In addition, he will curate a Domaine privé at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and he continues as Artistic Partner with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Through professorships in Cologne and Paris, as well as series of concert lectures and workshops worldwide, he sheds an inspiring and very personal light on music from all periods. He was the recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist Award in spring 2005 and was Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year for 2007.

Born in Lyon, France, in 1957, Pierre-Laurent Aimard studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Yvonne Loriod, and in London with Maria Curcio. Early career landmarks included winning first prize in the 1973 Messiaen Competition and being appointed at the age of 19 by Pierre Boulez to become the Ensemble Intercontemporain’s first solo pianist. For more than 15 years Mr. Aimard collaborated closely with György Ligeti, recording his complete works.

In recent years Pierre-Laurent Aimard has been honored with ECHO Classic Awards, both in 2003 for his recording of the complete Beethoven piano concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe led by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and in 2004 for Debussy’s Images and Etudes. Mr. Aimard’s recording of Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and songs with Susan Graham was a Grammy Award winner in 2005. Recent releases include recital discs of Ravel, Carter, and Schumann; his recording of Mozart piano concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which he directed from the keyboard, have been hailed by Die Zeit as “one of the most exquisite Mozart recordings of all time.” In August 2007 Mr. Aimard signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon; his first disc under this agreement, Bach: Art of Fugue, is due for release in spring 2008.