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Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Piano

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“This is manifestly a great work, and Aimard’s stupendous technique, remorseless energy and fanatical…passion, were wondrous to encounter.”
The Times, Paul Driver, April 2016

Widely acknowledged as a key figure in the music of our time as well as a leading interpreter of the standard piano repertoire, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally-celebrated career that transcends traditional boundaries. This year’s recipient of the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, Aimard champions music of all periods, from great composers of the past to the leading voices of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, with composers such as Boulez, Ligeti, Kurtág, Messiaen, Benjamin and Carter — among others — having written music especially for him, some in lifelong collaborations.

He performs throughout the world each season with major orchestras under conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Eötvös, Sir Simon Rattle and Vladimir Jurowski. He has been invited to curate, direct and perform in a number of residencies, with projects at Carnegie Hall, New York’s Lincoln Center, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, the Lucerne Festival, Mozarteum Salzburg, Cité de la Musique in Paris, and London’s Southbank Centre. Aimard was the Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 2009 to 2016, his final season was marked by a performance of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux with the concerts programmed from dawn to midnight.

This season sees the start of his three year tenure as Artist-in-Residence at Southbank Centre. Other highlights include recitals in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, St Petersburg, Paris, Vienna, New York and at the new Boulezsaal in Berlin. Orchestral performances include concerts with Boston Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and a European tour with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.

Pierre-Laurent has made many highly successful recordings. His first Deutsche Grammophon release, Bach’s Art of Fugue, received both the Diapason d’Or and Choc du Monde de la Musique awards, debuted at No.1 on Billboard’s classical chart and topped iTunes’ classical album download chart. In recent years Pierre-Laurent has been honoured with a Grammy award in 2005 for his recording of Ives’ Concord Sonata and Songs and he was also presented with Germany’s Schallplattenkritik Honorary Prize in 2009. His recent recording of Murail and Benjamin with the Bayerischer Rundfunk won the 2017 Gramophone award in the Contemporary category. He has now signed an exclusive contract with Pentatone records, his first recording being the complete Catalogue d’oiseaux for release in Spring 2018.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard: Catalogue d’Oiseaux Album Trailer © MolinaVisuals-Igorstudio

Ravel- Concerto for the Left Hand (excerpt)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Excerpt from Liszt Project EPK © Deutsche Grammophon

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Appearance on Arte Lounge © Arte Lounge / studio.tv.film

Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations © Philharmonia Orchestra (London, UK)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Bach: Das Wohltemperierte Clavier, Teil 1 - Prelude & Fugue in E Major © DG

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Bach: Art of Fugue (excerpt) © DG

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Bartók: Concerto for Two Pianos (excerpt) © DG

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Liszt: Sonata in B Minor (excerpt) © DG

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Debussy: Minstrels (excerpt) © Deutsche Grammophon

“The masterly French musician divided his recital Tuesday night at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center between Beethoven’s Opus 106 and a selection of piano pieces by the great Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Ligeti that pose formidable technical and intellectual demands of their own. It was in every respect a triumphant conclusion to this season’s University of Chicago Presents Ligeti series, a series built around the participation of Aimard, who was Ligeti’s preferred interpreter of his keyboard works […] What Aimard delivered was deeply satisfying, a “Hammerklavier” those lucky enough to hear it will long remember.… Aimard is among the greats of his generation.“

(Chicago Tribune, March 2018)

“It was a wonderfully intelligent performance, which carefully probed the deeper resonances of a work that some still perceive as flippant. Aimard dazzled with his dexterity in the outer movements, but the strikingly weighty tone he adopted for the adagio exposed a streak of dark, troubling melancholy beneath the wistful surface poise.”

(The Guardian, January 2018)

“…stunned into silence by the level of compositional invention and the surpassing artistry required to convey it….. Aimard’s prodigious technique allows you to hear not the work behind the work of art but its poetry…Aimard’s performance had extraordinary power and clarity, undimmed throughout. It also had the requisite range of shades and tints, without a trace of self-indulgence or overdone sentiment.”

(Chicago Tribune, August 2017)

“At once mystic and blatantly sensual, the work is coloured by the performing styles of its creators: Aimard took Messiaen’s original role with its weight and emotional insistence, while Stefanovich tackled the volatile and immensely taxing music composed for Loriod. Both pianists bring impeccable precision and clarity to Messiaen and the result was at once both profoundly intimate and monumental, as austerity gave way to sensuousness, before the cycle culminated in the cosmic grandeur and ecstasy of the final Amen de la consummation. It was quite simply impossible to imagine it better done.”

(The Guardian, January 2017)

“He powered his way through it with a combination of commitment and deep sincerity, breathtakingly realising the sensuousness with which Messiaen conveys his metaphysical vision. A devotional serenity pervaded both the opening Regard du Père and the penultimate Je Dors, Mais Mon Coeur Veille, … Towards the end, Aimard seemed not so much to be playing the music as living it. … The final phrases plunged into an awestruck silence that seemed to last forever before the applause began.”

(Tim Ashley, The Guardian, April 2016)

“This is manifestly a great work, and Aimard’s stupendous technique, remorseless energy and fanatical…passion, were wondrous to encounter.”

(The Times, Paul Driver, April 2016)

“Pierre-Laurent Aimard was the unfussily stylish soloist in Couleurs de la cité celeste. … Beautifully voiced brass chorales were punctuated here by coruscating solos from Aimard.”

(The Arts Desk, April 2016)

“Aimard has a level of command and understanding to which resistance is futile. … With its extravagant imagery and hallucinatory narrative, this had been the musical equivalent of the Book of Revelation, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard was its high priest.”

(Classical Source, April 2016)

“Yet the even more intense experience came with Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, with the festival’s artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard as the formidable soloist. Every facet of this score emerged with the utmost clarity and immediacy: its tantalising polyrhythms, its luminosity, its haunting quality, and finally, its hell-for-leather finale.”

(Rian Evans, The Guardian, June 2015)

“Chiselled and glittering, Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s piano cascades and avian flights knocked us sideways.”

[Turangalîla] (Geoff Brown, The Times, June 2015)

“It was hard to imagine Ravel’s wrist-wrecking and finger-crunching solo part being better played than this.”

(The Guardian, February 2015)