Doing bird

A decade ago, the French pianist and poly-math Pierre-Laurent Aimard announced that he was ‘very bored to live in a world that contains so much music that wants to please the masses’. It was a remark that might have dropped from the lips of the late Pierre Boulez, the part-pseud, part-genius who presided over an aristocracy of the avant-garde lavishly funded by the French government.

Aimard was still in his teens when he was appointed pianist of Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1976. He made his name performing ruthlessly atonal music. In 2009 he was a surprise choice as director of the Aldeburgh Festival, where he devoted a series to the music of Helmut Lachenmann, whose ‘sound events are organised so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves’.

This made the Guardian happy. ‘Aimard has ensured that the provincialism Britten himself dreaded has no place here,’ it declared. Maybe so, but Aimard insisted that he was ‘not a priest in the Britten religion …on the contrary’. That was a brave thing to say. ‘Ben’ loved dropping people who’d offended him (easily done). If he were still alive it’s hard to imagine him being on speakers with Pierre-Laurent.

It’s all irrelevant now, though, because this is the pianist’s last Aldeburgh Festival and he’s leaving to applause. The priesthood was won over when, for the Britten centenary in 2013, Aimard staged Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach, where much of the opera is set. It was a glorious success.