Pierre-Laurent Aimard II

Charles Ives’s »Concord Sonata« is one of the 20th century’s most monumental piano sonatas – a flood of sound that is ludicrously demanding, with three systems of notation instead of the usual two. A challenge – even for an internationally accalimed pianist like Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The sonata makes reference to the American transcendentalist movement, for which the town of Concord was akin to a Weimar of the USA: it was here, in the middle of the 19th century, that writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne all lived. A concentration of talent that is reminiscent of Vienna in the early days of new music, which was central to the evening’s other featured composer: Arnold Schönberg.