Eloquent rage: Ligeti’s Etudes at QEH
Ligeti’s Etudes
Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Stalls G5, £15
12 May 2018
Southbank page
It does feel a privilege to be back in the Queen Elizabeth Hall watching Pierre-Laurent Aimard play awesome music. There’s a weird déja-vu nostalgia, like the concert must be happening three years ago and is already a memory as it unfolds, mingled with gratitude at thinking how the same music would have sounded in the Royal Festival Hall, or St John’s Smith Square. Welcome back, QEH. I missed you.
I have gratitude too for Aimard, for being the musician he is with the experience he has, for wanting to put on this kind of festival, for wanting to do it in London, for wanting to talk about it afterwards. His performance was brilliant, vibrant, venomous; richly detailed, demonically powered, bearing nuance the result of a career-long engagement with this music and a close study of the composer’s intentions. I sort of wished for him to be tired and crotchety, or tired and generic, in the long Q&A in the second half, as homage to his achievement in the first – but as usual he was graceful and articulate, striking me again by the always surprising reliability of great musicians to say interesting things.
I’m not sure it would be right to be grateful to Ligeti for the Etudes, as dangerously close to gratitude for suffering. But through them he makes the world a better place, its music of ferocity and despair and madness that rails so passionately, so eloquently, so exuberantly against our absurdities and our cruelties.
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