A theme evening to the sound of bells, nice idea. On their Steinways, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich create reverberation spaces built from wide chords and let them ring, high up with fine, fast fingers as well as deep down in the bass, with a sonorous ebbing reverberation.
Ravel’s “Entre cloches”, the “Prayer Bell Sketch” by Messiaen’s student Oliver Knussen, above all George Enescu’s “Carillon nocturnes” with a carillon that is getting on in years, as it were, together with overtones “detuned” to excessive sevenths and diminished ninths: that’s how it may sound , when bells dream, sleep, tell each other something.
The two pianists often perform together, a congenial duo – with Tamara Stefanovich captivating more than Aimard with the grace and amazing ease with which he masters the highly virtuosic parts of Harrison Birtwistle’s “Keyboard Engine” and Olivier Messiaen’s “Visions de l’Amen”. Just watching her is a pleasure.
The sometimes shrill, sometimes self-forgotten cacophony of Birtwistle’s music machine witching hour repeatedly leads to ironic parts when the two spin wildly in circles, startle each other, throw individual notes or play tag. Delirious sirens, crazy music boxes: Birtwistle explores the inner workings of machines – they too can be disturbed sensitive little ones. Aimard and Stefanovich premiered the play by the Briton, who died in 2022, at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2018.
Messiaen wrote his seven Amen visions in 1943 after returning from captivity. One does not have to be religious to understand its metaphysical dimension. While Aimard primes the action, Stefanovich chisels the brazen, third-descending theme in a high register, dissolves the sharp sequence of tones into gamelan-like or birdcall-interspersed celestial music and unleashes the elements in the final vision. “We do not understand, we are blinded,” wrote Messiaen. Exuberant tonal cascades, sparkling, glistening sounds, flooding colors – the Boulez Saal rarely experiences so much ecstasy.
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Source: Tagesspiegel
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