Digital mastery

From a purely pianistic point of view, Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Monday night was as brilliant as it gets.

Aimard is a startlingly good pianist. He has a Modernist sensibility and conveys in everything he plays a belief in progress. Hearing his account of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata can make you feel glad to be alive at this moment in time. Just as Beethoven’s audiences had no idea what the solar system looks like through the Hubble telescope, they could never have imagined what the “Appassionata” sounds like played on a modern Steinway by a pianist whose fingers have been trained by the music of Pierre Boulez and Gyorgy Ligeti.

Such Modernism may not be every Beethoven buff’s idea of a good time. In the classical music world, extreme clarity, and Aimard is a supreme clarifier, often comes across as cool and clinical. Certain French musicians, and Aimard is certainly French, have, the cliche goes, ice in their veins. Intellectual musicians, and Aimard is very much a thinking person’s pianist, are well-known clinicians. Specialists in new music, especially specialists in mathematically clever modern French music, the music with which Aimard made his name, are suspected of being more analytical scientists than feeling musicians.

Aimard is all of those things. But he is all of those things with one of the most splendid sets of fingers in the business, and that makes all the difference. Each digit acts as if it has its own brain and sensory system. Each time a finger hits a key, it produces a perfectly formed individual note, with its own color, unique half-life, distinct logic.

But if this was music-making as quantum physics, it was not an equation-laden textbook in sound. Just the opposite. Aimard gave a demonstration through the piano that when you start to look deeply into everything around you, nothing is as it seems.

He began with Boulez’s First Piano Sonata, written in 1946 when the now revered composer and conductor who turns 80 this month was an angry young man adamantly foisting upon the world music it had no hope of understanding and then berating, through words and music, the bewildered for their ignorance. Monday, I heard no anger in Aimard’s performance of this short, explosive sonata, just beauty. Boulez may detonate his phrases, but the resultant shards hang in the air and glisten like the awesome aural equivalent of shooting stars.

On the other hand, the familiar “Appassionata” provoked as if it were the work of an angry young man sitting among us. With the disquieting virtuosity of a human machine gun, Aimard sprayed the hall with Beethoven’s notes. You ducked, you smiled, you kept coming back for more.

For the second half, Aimard began with two late Liszt pieces from the third year of “Annees de Pelerinage” (Years of Pilgrimage). Here Liszt evokes the cypresses and fountains of the Villa d’Este in Italy. There is in this calmly collected music a sly revolution in harmony, and in Aimard’s perfectly tinted performances these pieces no longer were faded pianistic postcards but places we could visit today for spiritual refreshment.

Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” is one of the famous finger-busters in the repertory. Its three movements tell stories of the seductress Ondine, of a hanged man, of an evil goblin. A mysterious sensuousness runs throughout.

Aimard didn’t end his recital with an overt attempt to describe anything. He simply let his transcendent fingers do the walking -- and sprinting and high-jumping and diving and catapulting and flying over the moon.

You heard whatever you wanted to hear, just as in looking at the stars on a clear night you see whatever you want to see.