| Date and venue | Title | Submitted by |
|---|---|---|
| 11-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Messiaen, Mozart and Murail offer a kaleidoscope of colors and sounds at the New York Philharmonic | Rebecca Lentjes |
 “Synesthesia” is a neurological condition that causes an involuntary sensory experience to be provoked from an initial stimulation of a different sensory or cognitive pathway – for instance, automatically associating colors with numbers, letters, or sounds. Olivier Messiaen, a 20th-century French composer, organist, and ornithologist, “heard” colors in all music, whether tonal, modal, or serial. His own compositions are undeniably colorful themselves, dating back to his early composition Les offrandes oubliées (“The Forgotten Offerings”).Read full review... | ||
| 11-Dec-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Debussy's Préludes in Vienna | Zwölftöner |
| Having only heard Pierre-Laurent Aimard on disc for the last few years it was curious to experience something rather different in the flesh, by way perhaps of that phenomenon, so often invoked as to be meaningless, of the artist for whom two concerts are never the same. I can say with some certainty that it will be some time before we ever hear a piano sound quite the same in the Mozart Saal, a room that habitually bestows brightness and brilliance in unforgiving quantities regardless of model or manufacturer, but which on this occasion was filled with a plush and intimate roundness.
Read full review... | ||
| 15-Nov-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Pierre-Laurent Aimard honors Debussy and Elliott Carter at Carnegie Hall | Rebecca Lentjes |
 When I first settled into my red velvet seat at Carnegie Hall, my excitement was overtaken by a grim foreboding. The hall’s internationally celebrated acoustics were offering an all-too-dazzling earful of sneezes and sniffles – a fact I observed in a germaphobic panic. Flu season has arrived in New York, but that didn’t deter anyone from attending Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s solo piano recital last Thursday. In fact, the hall was packed full of diverse (if sickly) listeners anticipating this incredibly versatile performer’s concert.
Read full review... | ||
| 3-Sep-2012 Cadogan Hall | Proms Chamber Music 8: Overwhelmed by Debussy – Pierre-Laurent Aimard at Cadogan Hall | Frances Wilson |
 Pierre-Laurent Aimard is a pianist who really likes to get inside the music he performs, whether Liszt, Boulez, Messiaen, or, as in the case of his Chamber Prom at Cadogan Hall (the last of the 2012 season), Debussy. In a concert to celebrate the sesquicentennial anniversary of Debussy’s birth, Aimard demonstrated not only his tremendous technical facility, but also his artistry and profound understanding of his compatriot’s oeuvre, the result, as Aimard admits, of being “overwhelmed” by Debussy from a young age.
Read full review... | ||
| 10-Jun-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Simon Rattle and the OAE make the case for period Impressionism | David Allen, unpredictableinevitability.com |
 Mat Henneck EMI.jpg) Sir Simon Rattle is an uncommonly gifted conductor of early 20th-century French music – Debussy, Ravel, and the like. The intrigue of this concert, then, radiated not from the rostrum but mostly from the orchestra itself. Playing with ‘period’ practice – though what that entailed was explained neither during the concert nor in the programme note – the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Rattle continued to press new ground, following on from their Prom of Berlioz and Wagner a few years ago with even more modern fare.Read full review... | ||
| 7-Dec-2011 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | Twenty-first century Liszt from Pierre-Laurent Aimard | Paul Kilbey |
 In around 1822, an eleven-year-old Franz Liszt performed for Beethoven. It’s claimed that Beethoven gave him his blessing and kissed him on the forehead. A lifetime later, in 1885, Liszt wrote La lugubre gondola, a harsh, drastically dissonant piano piece commemorating the death of Wagner.
Read full review... | ||
| 8-Nov-2011 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | Illuminating Pianism: The Liszt Project 1- Pierre-Laurent Aimard at Queen Elizabeth Hall | Frances Wilson |
 French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard gave the first of two concerts at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall to celebrate Franz Liszt’s bicentenary, and to coincide with the release of his ambitious recording, The Liszt Project.
In an inventive and impeccably performed programme, Aimard placed works by Liszt alongside music by Bartok, contemporary composer Marco Stroppa, Ravel and Messiaen to demonstrate Liszt’s profound and lasting influence, and as a way of blurring the borders between one style and another. Connections were made not just musically, but also thematically and metaphorically in a spell-binding concert of intense concentration and illuminating pianism.
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| 2-Sep-2011 Usher Hall | A time to dance | Alan Coady |
 It's about time. Certainly Chronochromie is about the colour of time, but grasping the essence of much of Messiaen's music depends on being in synchrony with his take on time in music – specifically intimations of the eternal. His endeavour to create such a musical environment requires jettisoning many of western music givens: regular metre; harmonic rhythm; a sense of destination and relief at its arrival. A mystic such as Messiaen was sufficiently comfortable with paradox to embrace the compositional rhythmic rigour that this approach would entail.Read full review... | ||
