“Superb” ★★★★★

“To grasp the full scope of Bartók’s piano music, in all its gritty lyricism and angular, percussive splendour, it helps to have an artist on hand like the French keyboard virtuoso Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Sometimes it can even feel indispensable 

Aimard, and particularly his distinctive gift for the craggier corners of the piano repertoire, is the key to this undertaking. He’s a performer of obvious technical prowess, who throws himself into the virtuoso aspects of a work without letting it crowd out other elements. He boasts a keyboard touch that is somehow both steely and delicate, like an iron fist inside a velvet glove.”

“Aimard is entirely at home in a work he’s played many times and his crystalline performance here was dynamically alert, rhythmically incisive, and sensitively integrated with the delicate textures of Ravel’s bravura orchestration”

“Another old friend, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, was the soloist in Ravel’s G major Concerto. Benjamin and the orchestra set the tone of the performance with effervescently transparent textures, while Aimard’s playing had the hard-edged sparkle of cut glass. And to complete the belated birthday homage, his encore was Benjamin’s Relativity Rag, which deconstructs a two-part rag into shards of chromaticism, before reassembling the bits into a brief reminder of the original, with its tongue always firmly in its cheek.”

“But Mr. Aimard’s overarching agenda, connecting Beethoven’s music, in his 250^th birthday year, to strands of 20^th-century modernism, came through with clarity, attesting to the strength of his vision and the savvy of his juxtapositions…The roiling, abrupt ending of the ​“Moonlight” led, without pause, to the dark, wet sounds — like the autumn leaves I was crushing underfoot — of another section from Messiaen’s ​“Oiseaux,” ​“La Chouette Hulotte” (“The Tawny Owl”). The ferocious ending of Beethoven’s ​“Appassionata” Sonata was immediately followed by the similarly pounding opening chords of Stockhausen’s ​“Klavierstück IX.”

“1808 Reconstructed never attempted to mimic ​“period” styles, but with Aimard you could sense the desire to capture something of the suspenseful excitement of Beethoven’s own performances… we had an elegant attack and clean-limbed articulation, rising to a spiky, angular urgency in the first-movement cadenza. If the ghostly figures of the Andante lacked a little mystery, the closing rondo leaped and twirled with ravishing lucidity and perfectly-judged balance between piano and orchestra.”

“This was playing of jaw-dropping virtuosity, infused with that ineffable quality that raises less than one-in-a-hundred musical experiences into the realm of the sublime.”

“He had you running to keep up with polyrhythmic complexities, the hyperactive layering of material, the fleeting moments of congruence and dispersal, and the mind-bending invention. You wonder how anyone can get the notes under two hands, then wonder all the more that all these elements combine to go to the heart of modernism, presenting extremes of tragedy, desperation, bafflement, fantasy and alienation, all expressed in a ferocious humanity. The Queen Elizabeth Hall was packed for Aimard’s miraculous exposé of human and instrumental engineering.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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