Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s impressive three-week U.S. run
There can be few other musicians who could rise to the challenges awaiting French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard this winter, when in three short weeks he performs four major works in four U.S. cities with three leading American orchestras under two superstar conductors, including back-to-back nights – featuring different programs – at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Aimard will play Bartók’s Concerto for Two Pianos with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez in three subscription concerts (Jan 21-23) and in Carnegie Hall (Jan 31), making time to celebrate the legendary composer/conductor’s 85th birthday in a special tribute concert in Chicago (Jan 24). With the Boston Symphony and its music director, James Levine, Aimard will perform both Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Elliott Carter’s Dialogues for piano and orchestra, first in Boston (Jan 28-30) and then – the day after his Bartók performance at the same venue – at Carnegie Hall (Feb 1). The following morning Aimard leaves for Cleveland, where he will reunite with Boulez, now at the helm of the Cleveland Orchestra, to perform and record both Ravel Piano Concertos (Feb 4, 6, & 7).
Aimard and Boulez have just been honored with a Grammy nomination for the most recent recording they have made together – of Bartók’s Concerto for Two Pianos; it is this same work that they perform with the Chicago Symphony. As on the Deutsche Grammophon disc, the second piano soloist is Tamara Stefanovich, a regular collaborator with Aimard. This synthesis of artists, conductor, and repertoire is a happy one, as both the Grammy nod and a spate of critical accolades attest: “The two-piano concerto…is the CD’s jewel,” asserted Geoff Brown in the Times of London, continuing, “We luxuriate in the pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich.” “A vivid account,” agreed Tim Homfray of the Strad magazine; Germany’s Rheinischer Merkur praised the performance’s “razor-sharp precision and exciting, sometimes savage, sometimes furious rhythms,” while Die Zeit deemed it simply “gorgeous”.
This should come as no surprise to those who have heard Aimard’s Bartók interpretations before. After his traversal of the Hungarian composer’s First Piano Concerto, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported: “Soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard was impressive throughout and brought a sense of excitement to his playing. … [Bartók’s concerto] demands incredible technical skill, which Aimard has in spades.” The three Chicago performances take place on January 21-23, in the city’s Orchestra Hall; as at Carnegie Hall on January 31, the program will also feature Stravinsky’s Firebird and Boulez’s own Livre pour cordes.
Before traveling to New York, Aimard joins musicians from the Chicago Symphony to celebrate Boulez’s 85th birthday in a program showcasing the great composer/conductor’s chamber works. The relationship between the two French musicians is a close one; at Boulez’s invitation, Aimard was a founding member of Ensemble Intercontemporain, the conductor’s IRCAM-based chamber orchestra, and he played with the group for many years, participating in a number of important premieres. Aimard found the experience valuable, and has described it as “a great antidote to what can be the poisonous life of a soloist,” so chamber music is a particularly fitting way of honoring his friend.
The final leg of Aimard’s eventful winter schedule also involves Boulez, whom he rejoins to perform and record Ravel’s two piano concertos – the Piano Concerto in G major and the Concerto for the Left Hand – with the Cleveland Orchestra. The concert performances, at the orchestra’s home in Severance Hall (Feb 4, 6, & 7), form the centerpiece of an all-French program. Like Aimard and Boulez’s recent Grammy-nominated collaboration, the new recording will be issued by Deutsche Grammophon, and promises to be a noteworthy release. Ravel is another of the many composers with whose music the pianist has wowed the critics. “Aimard’s Ravel performance is difficult to over-praise,” confessed Gramophone in its review of Aimard’s Ravel and Elliott Carter CD, a disc that Fanfare declared “a brilliant and compelling release in every way.”
Ravel and Carter are the two composers on Aimard’s agenda with the Boston Symphony and its music director, James Levine, with whom he plays Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, this time coupled with Carter’s Dialogues, in Boston (Jan 28-30) and Carnegie Hall (Feb 1).
Like Boulez, the 101-year-old, two-time Pulitzer-winning Elliott Carter is personally known to Aimard. The New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini attended the pianist’s 2006 Zankel Hall recital and described “his staggering technique, searching intellect, and fantastical imagination,” also revealing that “as a last-minute surprise, Mr. Aimard also played the premiere of an impetuous, finger-twisting piano piece, Caténaires, by Elliott Carter, who was there to take a bow on his 98th birthday.” Composed in 2003 and scored for piano and chamber orchestra, Dialogues, like Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, features fiendishly difficult piano writing.
After his intensive three weeks in the U.S., Pierre-Laurent Aimard returns to Europe, where he has just been awarded a prestigious Honorary Diploma by the German Record Critics Association (Deutschen Schallplattenkritik), and where, later in the season, he resumes his role as Artistic Director of England’s famed Aldeburgh Festival (June 11-27). Highlights of Aldeburgh’s 2010 program include a visit from Boulez, a celebration of Peter Pears on his centenary, and Aimard’s performance of a new “Collage-Montage”.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard: selected engagements, early 2010
January 21-23
Orchestra Hall, Chicago
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Boulez
Bartók: Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion
Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, piano
January 24
Orchestra Hall, Chicago
Musicians from Chicago Symphony Orchestra
SCP Chamber / MusicNOW – Pierre Boulez @ 85 (tribute concert)
Chamber music by Boulez, Borowski, and Fujikura
January 28-30
Symphony Hall, Boston, MA
Boston Symphony Orchestra / James Levine
Ravel: Concerto for the Left Hand
Carter: Dialogues
January 31
Carnegie Hall, NY
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Boulez
Bartók: Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion
Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, piano
February 1
Carnegie Hall, NY
Boston Symphony Orchestra / James Levine
Ravel: Concerto for the Left Hand
Carter: Dialogues
February 4, 6, and 7
Severance Hall, Cleveland
Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major
Ravel: Concerto for the Left Hand
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© 21C Media Group, December 2009