Reportedly, after having been exasperated by the glosses of some performer, or maybe by Toscanini conducting Boléro, Ravel was provoked to say that he didn‘t want his music interpreted, ‘it‘s enough for it to be played‘. The warning isn‘t lost on a musician-pianist of Pierre-Laurent Aimard‘s quality. One could expect his account of Gaspard de la nuit to have pleased the composer mightily: totally focused and attentive to the text, scrupulously controlled in sound and movement, the articulation of the continuity as Ravel insisted it should be, that’s to say with the unity of time preserved, in all three pieces. No otiose slowings. Nothing imposed, only revealed. Be expressive, be dazzling, be magical, be a virtuoso story-teller, but get on with it (as Ravel might have said), and above all play in time.

With the composer looking over his shoulder, the pianist might murmur that there‘s also the little matter of taking care of every note, intellectually and technically, and of being able not only to play them but to conjure a range of sonority and a rhythmic context in which everything happens at the right time. Aimard might agree that Gaspard de la nuit, consisting as it does of three highly contrasted pieces, is not just hugely demanding but an encyclopedic work, in the sense that the performance of it is the measure of all the artistic and technical qualities of the mature player. Difficult to over-praise his achievement here, I think, for its freshness and authority and the impeccable pianistic address, and the only reservation I could voice, a very small one, has to do with the lack of a touch of fury, or frenzy, in his characterisation of ‘Scarbo‘. The dwarf is a hideous little devil, not just a mischievous one, and Louis Lortie, maybe because he‘s outstanding in Liszt as well as Ravel, portrays him with more menace.

The excellent recording derives from the large hall of the Konzerthaus in Vienna, last February; the acoustic has character and the sound is at an apt distance. The conjunction of Ravel and Elliott Carter may not be attractive to everyone but Aimard sees a commitment to new music as part of his job, in the same way as Maurizio Pollini does; would that there were more artists like them.

On a bonus disc he talks well about how the Carter pieces are made, and for people unfamiliar with them this could be a way in. How Carter‘s pieces are made is very much their raison d‘être: his is predominantly a music of lines, of contrapuntal voices highly differentiated in character and movement and in their stability one against another, and how these may be built into structures rich in polyrhythmic effects.

Night Fantasies is the major work for piano of Carter‘s maturity, and it has a lot going on. I find it admirable but unmemorable, masterly music which offers much to the mind but not enough refreshment to the spirit, as if a dimension were missing, which I think it is. The three shorter pieces, in which the play of invention is delightful in itself, raise my expectations less and satisfy them more. But in Carter, as in Ravel, Aimard‘s advocacy is wonderful.