NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra / Pierre-Laurent Aimard / Ingo Metzmacher

Spectralistic aesthetics

»Don’t be afraid of new sounds« is the title of a book by Ingo Metzmacher, the former director of the Hamburg State Opera. And this passion for inquisitive expeditions to explore the exciting music landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries is something he shares with the exceptional French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. It therefore comes as no surprise that the two of them present a fairly new work in this concert with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra: the piano concerto »Le Désenchantement du monde« (The Disenchantment of the World), written for Aimard by Tristan Murail in 2012. Taking Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto as his model, the French composer wrote a one-movement symphonic concerto half an hour in length that, with its intensely colourful blending and overlapping of sound, is entirely in keeping with the »spectralistic« aesthetics for which Murail is known.