Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957) is a French pianist. He focuses on contemporary music.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957) is a French pianist. He focuses on contemporary music.
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.
In 2024, Aimard premiered Mark Andre's ...selig ist... at the Donaueschingen Festival. [13]
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.
Yvonne Louise Georgette Loriod-Messiaen was a French pianist, teacher, and composer, and the second wife of composer Olivier Messiaen. Her sister was the Ondes Martenot player Jeanne Loriod.
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. In 2024, he announced his resignation from the San Francisco Symphony upon the expiration of his contract in 2025.
Tabea Zimmermann is a German violist who has performed internationally, both as a soloist and a chamber musician. She has been artist in residence of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2004, Zimmermann founded the Arcanto Quartet, a string quartet that performed until 2016. Several composers have written music for her, including György Ligeti, and she has made her own version of Bartók's Viola Concerto from the composer's sketches.
Hermann Rudolph Konrad Baumann was a German horn player who was a pioneer of the natural horn in the revival of both Baroque and Classical period music. He was a principal hornist of leading orchestras, and made an international career as a soloist. He made recordings such as Mozart's Horn Concertos on a natural horn with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the first recording of Ligeti's 1982 Horn Trio, which he had premiered. Baumann was professor of horn at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1969 for around 30 years.
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.
Musica ricercata is a set of eleven pieces for piano by György Ligeti. The work was composed from 1951 to 1953, shortly after the composer began lecturing at the Budapest Academy of Music. The work premiered on 18 November 1969 in Sundsvall, Sweden. Although the ricercata is an established contrapuntal style, Ligeti's title should probably be interpreted literally as "researched music" or "sought music". This work captures the essence of Ligeti's search to construct his own compositional style ex nihilo, and as such presages many of the more radical directions Ligeti would take in the future.
Till Fellner is an Austrian pianist.
Wolfgang Meyer was a German clarinetist and professor of clarinet at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe. He worked internationally as a soloist, in chamber music ensembles, and in jazz, with a repertoire from early music played on historical instruments to world premieres.
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.
Lilian Franck is a German film director and producer, best known for her 2010 documentary Pianomania, a collaborative work with filmmaker Robert Cibis and winner of the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the German Film Award for Best Sound Design in 2011 and the Semaine De La Critique prize at the Locarno International Film Festival.
Alain Damiens is a French classical clarinetist.
Erika Haase was a German classical pianist.
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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