Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957) is a French pianist.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957) is a French pianist.
Aimard was born in Lyon, where he entered the conservatory. Later he studied with Yvonne Loriod and with Maria Curcio. [1]
In 1973, he was awarded the chamber music prize of the Paris Conservatoire. In the same year, he won the first prize at the international Olivier Messiaen Competition. In 1977, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, he became a founding member of the Ensemble InterContemporain. He made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of twenty, performing the piano solo part in Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie .
Aimard is particularly committed to contemporary music. He was the soloist in several premieres of works such as Répons by Pierre Boulez, Klavierstück XIV by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the eleventh and thirteenth piano études of György Ligeti. One of his most notable recordings is that of the first two books of Ligeti's piano études. He has also performed the work of contemporary composers such as George Benjamin, Roberto Carnevale and Marco Stroppa. In May 2012, he premiered Tristan Murail's piano concerto Le Désenchantement du Monde.
Aimard was one of Carnegie Hall's "Perspectives" artists for the 2006–2007 concert season, where he programmed his own series of concerts. [2] [3] [4] He served as artist-in-residence with the Cleveland Orchestra for two seasons, from 2007 to 2009. In 2007 Aimard was the Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival.
In addition to his work with contemporary music, Aimard has recorded the five Beethoven piano concertos with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, [5] at the invitation of Harnoncourt. Aimard has recorded for the Sony Classical and Teldec labels. In August 2007, he signed a new recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. [6]
Aimard has recently extended his musical activities to conducting, [7] although he characterized his interest and gift for conducting as follows:
To be clear: I am not a conductor, and I will never be one. This is not my way of life, and I have nothing to do with that, and have no talent for that. But if you want me to give a definition to what I do, I wouldn't say I'm a pianist – I'm a musician, and the piano happens to be my instrument. I don't like to have one function, to give me just one perspective on music. I like to make chamber music, to be part of a group, to play song accompaniments, to teach, to speak about music. In other words, to live the phenomenon on different sides. [8]
In 2009, Aimard became the Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival in England, for an initial contract of 3 years. Aimard is a visiting professor and an Honorary Member (2006) of the Royal Academy of Music. [9] He appears in the 2007 film Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 . [10]
Aimard was featured recording Bach's The Art of Fugue in the 2009 award-winning German-Austrian documentary Pianomania , about Steinway & Sons' piano technician Stefan Knüpfer, which was directed by Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis. The film premiered theatrically in North America, where it was met with positive reviews by The New York Times , [11] as well as in Asia and throughout Europe, and is a part of the Goethe-Institut catalogue.
In 2017 Aimard signed with the PENTATONE label. [12] Under this collaboration Aimard intends to record key works from his repertoire, spanning three centuries and ranging from Bach to Kurtág, beginning with his first ever recording of Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux.
György Sándor Ligeti was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" and "one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time".
Johann Nikolaus Harnoncourt was an Austrian conductor, known for his historically informed performances. He specialized in music of the Baroque period, but later extended his repertoire to include Classical and early Romantic works. Among his best known recordings are those of Bach, whose 193 cantatas he recorded with Gustav Leonhardt.
Sir George William John Benjamin, CBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. He is also a conductor, pianist and teacher. He is well known for operas Into the Little Hill (2006), Written on Skin (2009–2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2015–2017)—all with librettos by Martin Crimp. In 2019, critics at The Guardian ranked Written on Skin as the second best work of the 21st-century.
Esa-Pekka Salonen is a Finnish conductor and composer. He is the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra in London and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
The Gulbenkian Orchestra is a Portuguese symphony orchestra based in Lisbon. The orchestra primarily gives concerts at the Grande Auditório of the Gulbenkian Foundation. The orchestra, which was founded in 1962 as a chamber orchestra, currently has 66 permanent musicians.
The Piano Concerto No. 2 in G major, Sz. 95, BB 101 of Béla Bartók is a musical composition for piano and orchestra. The work, which was composed between 1930 and 1931, is notorious for being one of the most difficult pieces in the repertoire.
Atmosphères is a piece for orchestra, composed by György Ligeti in 1961. It is noted for eschewing conventional melody and metre in favor of dense sound textures. After Apparitions, it was the second piece Ligeti wrote to exploit what he called a "micropolyphonic" texture. It gained further exposure after being used in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE), established in 1981, is an orchestra based in London. The orchestra comprises about 60 members from across Europe. The players pursue parallel careers as international soloists, members of chamber groups and as tutors and teachers of music. The orchestra receives substantial support from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and the Underwood Trust; they have no single home resident hall and no appointed resident conductor. The orchestra is a registered charity under English law.
Rudolf Buchbinder is an Austrian classical pianist.
Till Fellner is an Austrian pianist.
David Ezra Okonşar is a Turkish–Belgian pianist, composer, conductor, writer, and educator. He was previously known as "Mehmet Okonşar".
Pianomania is a 2009 German-Austrian documentary film by directors Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis. The film presents Stefan Knüpfer, a virtuoso piano tuner from the piano company Steinway & Sons, in his work with pianists such as Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
The Hungarian composer György Ligeti composed a cycle of 18 études for solo piano between 1985 and 2001. They are considered one of the major creative achievements of his last decades, and one of the most significant sets of piano studies of the 20th century, combining virtuoso technical problems with expressive content, following in the line of the études of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy, and Alexander Scriabin but addressing new technical ideas as a compendium of the concepts Ligeti had worked out in his other works since the 1950s. Pianist Jeremy Denk wrote that they "are a crowning achievement of his career and of the piano literature; though still new, they are already classics."
Catalogue d'oiseaux is a work for piano solo by Olivier Messiaen consisting of thirteen pieces, written between October 1956 and September 1958. It is devoted to birds and dedicated to his second wife Yvonne Loriod.
Florent Boffard is a French classical pianist and pedagogue.
Alain Damiens is a French classical clarinetist.
The Concerto for Cello and Orchestra is a cello concerto by György Ligeti written in 1966. It is dedicated to cellist Siegfried Palm, who gave the concerto its premiere performance.
Hideki Nagano is a Japanese classical pianist. He has been a member of the Ensemble intercontemporain since 1995 and lives in France.
Detlev Müller-Siemens is a German composer and conductor.
Réveil des oiseaux is a work by Olivier Messiaen for piano and orchestra written in 1953. Messiaen invoked birdsong in this composition, as he had in the earlier Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941). In Réveil des oiseaux he used bird song motifs throughout.
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