Aimard’s expert curiosity

PIERRE-LAURENT Aimard’s stylish study on the second floor of his tastefully appointed apartment in the 17th arrondissement reveals a tidy, if inquiring, mind. CDs, scores and books are well organized, as much as an eclectic collection including Boulez and Pygmy music can be. African instruments are artfully displayed. But the shelves were constructed to lean at vertiginous angles. If this were a film set, I’d imagine that Bunuel, Godard and Michael Haneke all had a hand in it.

The gleaming black grand piano, though, is the straightforward centerpiece. Perhaps France’s finest pianist in a generation or two (or ever) and its most enterprising by a long shot, Aimard must practice somewhere when he is not on the road, as he often is. This week brings Aimard to Southern California, where he will serve as music director of the Ojai Music Festival.

Such tidiness, and especially the compartmentalization, are inevitably superficial. The French have always been very good at keeping up appearances. But you don’t have to dig deep to discover a maze. A mild-mannered, seemingly easygoing man, with a shy, slightly worried smile, Aimard also has a devilish, subversive side. He is an exact pianist, and he describes his thought processes with a straightforward Cartesian logic. But the connections are never quite what you might imagine. Four years ago, for instance, he put together a dazzling CD, “African Rhythms,” in which he alternates the music of Aka Pygmies, American Minimalist Steve Reich and Hungarian avant-garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti.

On this lovely spring afternoon, Aimard pads around his designer pad, unshaven and slightly disheveled in jeans and slippers, sniffling from a cold. He’s just back from tour and just about to leave town again. His wife and daughter, both pianists as well, leave as I arrive. Aimard doesn’t express himself nearly as well in English as in French, but he gets by. He makes expert espressos for us, sits down and tries to explain how it is that one pianist can do so many things.

“When you meet an audience, you have a feeling that you open some doors,” he says, trying to find words for his impossibly wide repertory, which is grounded in the new but pretty much encompasses the history of the piano. “Of course, I like risk. And I have curiosity.”

To put those words in perspective, it is worth importing a paragraph from Aimard’s official biography for this year’s Ojai festival:

“During the 2006-07 season, he curates a ‘Perspective’ series at Carnegie Hall in New York, a ‘carte blanche’ at the Konzerthaus Vienna and is pianist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. He commences a song recital series at the Palais Garnier, Opera de Paris, and maintains a regular presence also at the Philharmonie Cologne, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and South Bank Centre, London. He was artist-in-residence at the Salle de Concerts Grande-Duchesse Josephine-Charlotte, Luxembourg, in 2005-06, its opening season, and this season he begins a three-year term as artistic partner with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.” Keep in mind that in all of these endeavors, Aimard says he “finds it uninteresting to repeat a program.” So he rarely does.

And of course, there is Ojai, where he will play solo and ensemble works by Stravinsky, Schumann, Bach, Ives (the monumental “Concord” Sonata) and Elliott Carter and concertos by Mozart, Ligeti and Ravel. He will conduct Carter’s “Dialogues.” He will premiere “Sonata per Sei,” which is a new version of a concerto Peter Eotvos recently wrote for him. At Aimard’s invitation, the Hungarian composer will also conduct the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra on Saturday night in his chamber piece “Chinese Opera” and a chamber orchestra version of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.”

About all that is missing are those Aka Pygmies.

The various series Aimard curates, it probably goes without saying, have different themes. In Luxembourg, the focus was on education. “I wanted to create a lot of possibilities for piano students and young audiences,” he says. “We did a show for audiences aged 3 to 5.” He also commissioned a solo piano piece by British composer George Benjamin for child pianists and made its performances by five of the kids the center of one of his recitals there.

“I like very much the image for each nation that you can get involved with an audience and have a sense of adventure,” he continues. “Sometimes I might involve the same kinds of events in different places, but always in such different ways that there is never really much overlap. Audiences are different. Institutions are different. And my history with each place is different as well.”

New music’s favorite son

AIMARD’S history of places begins most with Paris. Although born in Lyon (he turns 50 in September), he attracted attention in Parisian new music circles early on. By 18 he had won the Olivier Messiaen Competition. He was just reaching 20 when Pierre Boulez invited him to be a founding member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which became overnight (and remains) the stellar French new music ensemble. Aimard was known for being able to play anything and, with his phenomenal precision and glittery tone, make even the most abstract and difficult music sparkle.

Composers flocked to him. Ligeti wrote his Etudes for Aimard, studies the Hungarian composer began in the ‘90s and continued contributing to until his death last year. At first, these formidable masterpieces seemed unplayable. But Aimard played them, astounding audiences and putting out the dare to other pianists. Now they are a must for young musicians wanting to prove their chops, Chopin’s Etudes seeming all but technically passe in comparison.

Nothing could make Aimard happier. Acknowledging that Ligeti, to whom he became close, was a difficult person, he credits him with being able to keep his avant-garde identity and also “transform his style to keep current with the way the planet and culture changed.

“What I like most is when a composer asks a lot,” he says. “The level becomes higher. I think it’s good to have such people who are courageous and independent enough to say the truth to other powerful or famous people. We are living in a world that is too easygoing.”

As a great and greatly in demand pianist of modern music, Aimard, to his chagrin, became known only for that. “I had a double education,” he explains, “double because the institutions did not, when I was starting out in the 1970s, have a full panorama of music, so I had to go my own way.

“The problem was that it was not easy to bring together my interest in new music and all other music. I wanted to give the priority to new music, because you get the chance to work with living composers. Beethoven scores are available your whole life long, and a lot of people play them. But I got put in a box, and I was a bit irritated that it could be so narrow at times.

“Now,” he says, “I’m very happy to compensate for that.”

The compensation began in earnest six or seven years ago. Aimard raised eyebrows in new music circles in 2001 when he recorded Dvorak’s seldom-played Piano Concerto with early music specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt and followed that two years later with the five Beethoven piano concertos. His Carnegie Hall debut, also in 2001 and issued on CD as a live recording, included a luminous account of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata in company with Liszt, Ligeti, Berg, Debussy and Messiaen.

Lately Aimard has taken to Schumann, and a recent recording of “Carnival” and the Symphonic Etudes reveals gleaming colors in these familiar pieces that are not familiar at all. Much more Schumann is on the way. So is Mozart. Aimard is working his way through the 27 concertos, conducting them from the keyboard with the Chamber Music of Europe. His crystalline recording of Nos. 6, 15 and 27 was one of the best of the zillions of Mozart releases last year celebrating the composer’s 250th birthday. Brahms, he said, had to wait for his 40s, and he now plays him more and more. Bach is coming up, maybe soon.

“I think this is interesting if what we do is use these occasions for discovering and sharing,” he says. “Now the problem is to try to do it well. That means to have time for holidays and for yourself. Time for breathing and time for learning and preparing the interpretations.”

Time is both Aimard’s friend and enemy. The time he has taken to indulge his curiosity in the world has resulted in concert series that have paired music with film, with art, with literature, with whatever is happening on the street.

“You need to know that it is the right time and place to try out a new style, to prepare a new style for a new place,” he concludes. “And this is very interesting because you have to know what you want to do, what are your forces and what is the power of your concentration.”

And you have to know when to stop. Aimard keeps talking as he ushers me out to the street. His wife and daughter will soon be back, and he never has nearly enough time for them.

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mark.swed@latimes.com

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Ojai Music Festival

Where: Libbey Bowl, Signal Street and East Ojai Avenue, Ojai

Price: $20 to $75

Contact: (805) 646-2094 or www.ojaifestival.org

Thursday: The Bugallo-Williams piano duo, 8 p.m.

Friday: Eotvos conducts, 8 p.m.

Saturday: Aimard piano recital, 11 a.m.; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, 8 p.m.

Next Sunday: Percussion concert, 11 a.m.; Ainard in four piano concertos, 5:30 p.m.