Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Queen Elizabeth Hall - review

This year, dozens of pianists have celebrated the bicentenary of Liszt's birth with recitals entirely given over to his music. That is not Pierre-Laurent Aimard's way. For him, a recital is a collection of unexpected juxtapositions. Last night, he put Liszt centre-stage but surrounded him with later works that, in different ways, fed off his music, making us listen anew.

This was an anthology of earth, air and water, with Aimard's imagination the fire that fused everything into an organic whole. He opened with the first of Liszt's evocations of The Cypresses at the Villa d'Este, firmly grounded at first, taking delirious flight when it needed to. The last of Bartók's Four Dirges followed, dark and tomb-like in its intensity before Liszt's St Francis of Assisi brought light and air into proceedings.

Piece by piece, other interpreters might have more to offer but it was the sequence of contrasts and affinities that gave Aimard's readings their integrity. The only contemporary piece he played was Marco Stroppa's Tangata Manu, in which his piano sounded at times like a bowed cello, at others like a mechanical bird.

Liszt's celebration of the fountains at the Villa d'Este flowed into Ravel's Jeux d'eau, something of an Aimard speciality, its ripples muscular and delicate. And no Aimard recital would be complete without Olivier Messiaen's music, here an extract from his mighty pianistic catalogue of birds that twittered, cooed and cawed like an overcrowded aviary.

Aimard played the music straight through, 75 minutes with no interval and only the odd mopping of his brow providing a break in his concentration. You wouldn't want every piano recital to be like this but Aimard, demanding more of himself than of us, made it work.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Queen Elizabeth Hall
SE1