Cédric Tiberghien performs Julian Anderson’s Étude No.4 ‘Misreading Rameau’ in Australia in March 2026, at the Hedberg in Hobart (21 March) and UKARIA Cultural Centre, Adelaide (29 March).
Anderson’s 3-minute piece puts Rameau’s keyboard work ‘Le Lardon’ – literally ‘the lump of lard’ – through a series of surreal procedures inspired by experimental French writer Raymond Queneau and his colleagues of the OULIPO. Rameau’s Lardon – which also inspired Paul Dukas for his Variations, interlude et finale sur un thème de Rameau – sees its treble and bass clefs swapped at will without changing the positions of the notes on the staves or their rhythms; Anderson also slows down the tempo considerably and adds selected octave doublings to the left-hand part.
The result is a solemn, somewhat processional work which becomes a gentle study in slow-motion keyboard agility. “My main aim in Misreading Rameau”, Anderson notes, “was to transform the rather plain Baroque original into music using the types of piano harmony and sonority I enjoy.”
Anderson’s preceding Études Nos. 1-3 (composed between 1995-1998) also cleave to creative constraints. No.1 is a short two-part polymetric invention that orbits the pitch C, as tribute to Sally Cavender, Anderson’s publisher at Faber Music. No.2 makes the pentatonic mode implied by the piano’s black notes its organising principle, coloured by varying numbers of white notes and further transpositions. No.3 is a double homage to Britten’s Diversions and Debussy’s Étude pour les Arpèges Composées, deploys circles of fourths and fifths alongside a mensural canon, resulting in complex harmonic cross-phasing and hemiolas.
Étude No.4 received its world premiere in Australia in 1999 from Stephen Gutman in Kununurra, WA. Tiberghien previously performed the piece at Wigmore Hall, alongside Anderson’s Études Nos.1-3, in 2013 as part of a day-long focus on the composer. He will give a further performance of Étude No.4 at Wigmore Hall on 4 April.