Pierre-Laurent Aimard

“Pierre-Laurent Aimard's account of the Ravel concerto was extraordinary, too. He used a handsome Erard piano that had a crisply defined tone, especially in the lower registers, which enabled him to profile the solo line against Ravel's orchestration with ease, while the textures around him, not least the Jurassic murmurings, with which the work opens, acquired a new clarity” (The Guardian, June 2012)

“…the piano’s distinctive woody resonance and clear bass register…was exploited by Aimard’s wonderfully taut playing…Aimard found two distinct levels of timbre for his cadenza, so that it sounded as thought the piano were accompanying itself” (The Times, 12 June 2012)

“Following Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s concert one understands the difference between a good pianist and a great one: the former works from the musical score alone while the latter plays with paradigms of culture” (Kommersant, January 2012)

“Liszt's "Les jeux d'eaux a la Villa d'Este" [was] followed by Ravel's lovely reworking of the idea, Aimard creating textures of dazzling beauty.” (The Independent, November 2011)

“Aimard has thought long and hard about what makes Liszt’s piano music so original and follows it down paths that lead to composers of widely disparate styles – an imaginative way to mark the anniversary for a musician who might not otherwise be thought an obvious Liszt interpreter. The Liszt pieces were thoughtfully chosen. [Aimard] made sure his tribute to the anniversary had its own story to tell. Liszt, after all, was a thinker, too.” (Financial Times, November 2011)

"Crisply voiced, transparent, expertly weighted in its slow-blooming, melancholy beauty, Tuesday's exercise in time travel and shared textures betrayed a sense that, for Aimard, the interest shown in Liszt by the living composers he most respects had persuaded him into territory he would otherwise not explore." (The Independent, November 2011)

"Aimard is a master of fine gradations of colour and weight, as was shown in Liszt’s Aux cyprès and Bartók’s Dirge, which had a similar huge melancholy weightiness. At the opposite end of the colour spectrum was the light and glitter of Liszt’s St Francis, echoed in a recent piece evoking flight by Marco Stroppa, and later by Messiaen’s Le Traquet stapazin." (The Telegraph, Nov 2011)