“This was Beethoven the eternal modern and revolutionary in all his fire and glory… Aimard’s most telling effects lay in his mastery of grinding dissonances, a turbulent flow and the madcap whirl of fleeting quotations from American hymns, patriotic songs and Ives’s catalogue…. Above all, as in the Hammerklavier, Aimard continually nurtured the sonata’s long span, embracing the composer’s disruptive power while respecting the need for elements to build; for the music, however chaotic, to make ​“sense”. Without that structural strength, the audience surely wouldn’t have clapped so loudly, or felt so uplifted and transformed.”

“Aimard, a true aristocrat, offered playing of great clarity gilded with a tasteful sense of rubato. His touch was lightness itself when called for. At other times he gripped the lip of the piano with his left hand to lend weight to earth-shattering runs in the right.”

“Aimard and Stefanovich muted those doubts, building up a cathedral out of stained-glass colours, piano tracery, rhythmic vaults, and thick trunks of sound. A Messiaen chord is a crystalline, faceted thing, full of internal symmetries that shimmer and glint. Just one would be enough to contemplate for a while, a snowflake on a fingertip. Instead, they come in flurries, piling up before your ear. […] To hear them play Visions is like listening with superpowered ears, each detail magnified and limpid, and at the same time arranged into an expressive structure.”

“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.“

“…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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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