For Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a “good program” should illustrate the interconnections between “a complex network of pieces,” illuminating mutual influences much as an art exhibit does. That he himself practices what he preaches is clear from the programming for his recital on 28 November. Aimard invites us on a musical journey through a hundred years of piano music from his French homeland.

For the beginning of his recital, Aimard has chosen an early work by his own “household god,” Olivier Messiaen: the eight “Préludes pour Piano” from 1928-29, which were written in response to the death of Messiaen’s mother. The 20-year-old composer, who described the Préludes as “a series of psychological states and personal feelings,” unmistakably draws on his great models: Debussy and Ravel, whose virtuoso work “Miroirs” (1904-05) Aimard has chosen as the second piece of his program. The magical sound of the Impressionists would in turn be unthinkable without the groundbreaking works that Frederic Chopin had created half a century before. It’s no coincidence that both Debussy and Ravel alike were “grandchild” students of Chopin: Both had piano teachers who had studied with the reat Polish émigré, and who passed his musical ideals on to the next generation—his preference for seemingly improvised melodies, for small forms, and for suggestive harmonies, as well as his disdain of affectation and exaggeration. French music can be described here as a family history.

Aimard’s journey back to the future suggests something else as well: that even in the 19th century, which was supposedly so concerned with the formation of “national” schools—for example, by turning a Saxon cantor (Bach) and a Rhinelander of Flemish origin who made his home in Vienna (Beethoven) into German heroes—music was valued as an international, unifying power. As a composer, was Chopin then a Pole or a Frenchman?