BBC Proms 2020 Season - A recital by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard [2008] (320kbps .mp3)

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

BBC Proms: a Proms Chamber Music recital from 2008 typical of the ever-questing Pierre-Laurent Aimard, blending music from various periods. Schumann’s last piano work looks forward with its harmonically advanced language. Its mood is taken up by Elliott Carter’s classic Night Fantasies of 1980, a work described by its composer as ‘a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that are passed through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night’.

Bartók is represented by his Out of Doors Suite, written very much with himself in mind as performer, and exploiting the piano’s percussive qualities to winning effect. And as a leading exponent of Messiaen’s piano music, Aimard offers a sketch of a night bird, ‘L’alouette lulu’ (The Woodlark).

Introduced by Christopher Cook.

01. Schumann - 5 Gesänge der Frühe, Op 133
01a. Introduction to the Pierre-Laurent Aimard prom
02. Elliott Carter - Night Fantasies
02a. Introduction to Carter’s Night Fantasies
03. Messiaen - Catalogue d’oiseaux – No 8, L’alouette lulu
03a. Introduction to Messiaen
04. Bartók - Out of Doors Suite
04a. Introduction to Bartók’s Out of Doors Suite
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

(From BBC Proms, 21 July 2008)