Pierre-Laurent Aimard / »Concord Sonata«

To this day, the experiment-loving American composer Charles Ives, who was fond of including everyday noises and functional music in his works, doesn’t necessarily feature in the standard repertoire. The Elbphilharmonie is now devoting a set of five concerts to this unusual composer. The first concert features Ives’s monumental Second Piano Sonata, the »Concord Sonata«, which was long regarded as unplayable. Complex, overlapping rhythms and metres, a collage-like style and quotations from Beethoven make the 45-minute work into a true event – and all the more so when a pianist of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s calibre is at the keyboard. Adam Walker and Tabea Zimmermann join him in the two outer movements on the flute and the viola respectively.