This Season, Pierre-Laurent Aimard Joins Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and Munich Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, Besides Headlining London’s “Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations”

Pierre-Laurent Aimard – the Grammy Award-winning French pianist hailed as “a brilliant musician and an extraordinary visionary” (Wall Street Journal) – makes three high-profile U.S. orchestral appearances this season. He launches 2016-17 with accounts of Ravel’s G-major Concerto at the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Pablo Heras-Casado (Oct 7–9), before reprising the jazz-inflected concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Munich Philharmonic at New York’s Carnegie Hall (April 3) and playing his signature Ligeti for a return to the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst (May 18–20). The pianist’s European highlights include a series at London’s Royal Festival Hall titled “Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations” in collaboration with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra; Dvorák’s concerto with Matthias Pintscher leading the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen; and an intensive program of solo and duo recitals in repertoire that ranges from Sweelinck to Boulez. This full lineup follows a summer that saw Aimard conclude the final season of his eight-year tenure as Artistic Director of England’s Aldeburgh Festival with a “triumph” that, as the New York Times put it, “will leave behind a landmark statement.”

Ravel with the orchestras of three continents

The French pianist, whose Ravel interpretations have been called “utterly sublime” (BBC Music), performs both his compatriot’s concertos this season. He explains:

“It’s interesting to compare both concertos, composed like a pair: a positive one, full of light and fun (the G-major concerto), and the other one (the left-hand concerto), dark and oppressive. Both of them incorporate jazz, but one in an entertainment way and the other one in a sarcastic way.”

The Piano Concerto in G is the vehicle for his upcoming dates with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Switzerland, and the Concerto for the Left Hand in D for performances with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony in Japan. With Gergiev and the Munich Philharmonic he plays both concertos; the G-major at Carnegie Hall and at the orchestra’s Munich home (March 27–28), and the left-hand concerto in a third Munich concert (March 29) and again in New Jersey (April 2).

Ligeti with the Cleveland Orchestra

It was with the two Ravel concertos that the pianist scored Les Victoires de la Musique Classique’s 2011 “Record of the Year” award. The album was recorded for Deutsche Grammophon with the Cleveland Orchestra under the leadership of its first principal guest conductor, Pierre Boulez. Thanks to his exceptionally rich personal and professional association with Boulez, Aimard enjoys a long history with the orchestra, where he served as Artist-in-Residence for both the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons. For his return to Cleveland, he plays the jazzy, rhythmically charged concerto of another great modernist, György Ligeti, with whom he shared an intimate working relationship until the Hungarian composer’s death ten years ago. It was Aimard who premiered and made first recordings of a number of Ligeti’s piano compositions, winning a 1997 Gramophone Award for his Sony Masterworks album of the Études, and he who inspired some of the composer’s most complex writing. As a result, he remains without peer as an exponent of Ligeti’s works, the composer himself pronouncing him “today’s leading interpreter of contemporary piano music.” Click here to see the Ligeti Project, the free, multilingual site Aimard launched last year under the auspices of the Ruhr Piano Festival’s Explore the Score; as The Guardian writes, this ambitious pedagogical undertaking offers “astonishingly multi-dimensional insight” into Ligeti’s music, from “the composer’s favourite interpreter … and it’s something no admirer should miss.”

“Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations” at London’s Royal Festival Hall; Dvorák in Germany

When Aimard collaborated with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra at London’s Royal Festival Hall two years ago, The Guardian called it “a must-hear highlight of this London orchestral season.” Now the two reunite with the orchestra at the Southbank Centre venue for a four-concert series celebrating their longstanding artistic partnership. This dates from the years they spent performing contemporary music together in Paris, to which Aimard tips his hat with a rendition of Boulez’s Notations for solo piano (May 4). Their programming includes performances of three 20th-century pieces for piano and orchestra, all of which break with the traditional Romantic concerto form: Ligeti’s Piano Concerto (Feb 19), Debussy’s Fantaisie (May 4), and – in collaboration with Aimard’s regular piano partner, Tamara Stefanovich – Bartók’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion (May 7). To complete the series, Aimard, Salonen, and the orchestra undertake Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto (Feb 23), besides touring it to Bristol, Basingstoke, Cardiff, and Madrid. The French pianist’s recording of the work – also the vehicle for his upcoming engagements with the orchestras of Nice, Bremen, and Frankfurt – was named an “Editor’s Choice” by Gramophone magazine, according to which it “tingles with a continuously vital, constantly modulated dynamic life that it too rarely receives.”

Aimard looks forward to working with Salonen again, observing: “He is 100 percent focused on the music and he knows exactly what he has to do. Nothing in what he does is artificial, and I find that extraordinary.” This admiration is mutual. Of Aimard, the great Finnish composer-conductor says:

“He is one of the most versatile, intellectually curious and agile pianists in the world. I like the way he thinks: music is music, and all music feeds off other music. Nothing exists in isolation. That philosophy is very close to my own heart. The best human relationships are those where you don’t have to explain what you are thinking all the time, in music as well as in life: both parties understand each other through gestures, almost like telepathy. One of the most inspiring things about working with Pierre-Laurent is that we really do have this type of communication.”

Like his Beethoven cycle, Aimard recorded Dvorák’s Piano Concerto under the leadership of the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt, prompting The Guardian to admire his playing’s “uncanny mix of spiritual wonder and martial art-like precision.” This spring he revisits the concerto, on a three-city German tour with Matthias Pintscher and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen that culminates at the Cologne Philharmonie (March 2–5).

Solo and duo recitals in Europe: from Sweelinck to Boulez

The performance with which Aimard crowned his Aldeburgh tenure comprised an all-day event devoted to his solo recital of Messiaen’s birdsong-inspired Catalogue d’oiseaux, played over the course of four concerts – the first at dawn, the last after midnight – all timed to interact with the activities of local birds on the Suffolk coast. This innovative and unprecedented event scored a five-star review in the UK’s Telegraph, while France’s Figaro pronounced it “simply magic” and the New York Times observed:

“Mr. Aimard … has good credentials, as a pupil of Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s wife, muse and dedicatee of the Catalogue. And in these Aldeburgh readings he was masterful, with an incisive brilliance and relentless focus that acknowledged how the music marries rigorous complexity with childlike innocence, unsentimental clinicism with romantic charm. He kept the sense of line through episodic stops and starts. And he observed the sense of mystery in the writing, as inscrutable as birds themselves.”

Messiaen’s Catalogue and Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus both figure prominently in the pianist’s extensive 2016-17 European recital programming, as does the music of György Kurtág – another of the key contemporary composers he counts among his friends – often juxtaposed with works by Sweelinck, Schumann and Chopin. Highlights include dates in Amsterdam (Oct 15), Lugano (Oct 18), and Cambridge, UK (Oct 21), as well as a return to London’s Wigmore Hall, where Aimard pairs the music of Liszt, Debussy, Scriabin, and Obukhov with the London premiere of Julian Anderson’s Sensation (March 11). In Berlin, his performances of works by Ligeti and Kurtág will be interspersed with Alfred Brendel’s readings from his own collection of poems, One Finger Too Many (April 28).

It was also in the German capital that Aimard scored another recent triumph, with “Hommage à Pierre Boulez” at Musikfest Berlin 2016. This was one of the formidable all-Boulez marathons with which he and Tamara Stefanovich have repeatedly won renown, the UK’s Independent considering their accounts of the French composer’s music “as definitive as it gets.” Aimard and Stefanovich undertake European duo recitals in a variety of repertoire this season, culminating with a reprise of their signature Boulez program at the Vienna Konzerthaus (May 29).

A high-resolution photo is provided here.
www.pierrelaurentaimard.com
www.facebook.com/pierrelaurentaimard

Pierre-Laurent Aimard: 2016-17 engagements

Oct 7, 8, 9
Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles Philharmonic / Pablo Heras-Casado
RAVEL: Piano Concerto in G

Oct 15
Amsterdam, Holland
Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ
SWEELINCK: Echo Fantasia No.1
SWEELINCK: Fantasia chromatica
KURTÁG: Játékok (excerpts)
KURTÁG: Passio sine nomine
KURTÁG: Draft-Sheet for for Tünde Szitha
KURTÁG: For Bálint András Varga’s 70th birthday
KURTÁG: Splinters (Szálkák), Op. 6d
SCHUMANN: Bunte Blätter, Op. 99

Oct 18
Lugano, Switzerland
Lugano Festival
SWEELINCK: Echo Fantasia No.1
SWEELINCK: Fantasia chromatica
KURTÁG: Passio sine nomine
KURTÁG: Játékok: Antiphone in F#
CHOPIN: Nocturne in E, Op. 62, No. 2
CHOPIN: Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1
CHOPIN: Nocturne in F# minor, Op. 48, No. 2
MESSIAEN: Catalogue d’oiseaux (excerpts)

Oct 19
Parma, Italy
Prometheus Foundation
GEORGE BENJAMIN: Shadowlines
LIGETI: Musica Ricercata
BOULEZ: Sonata for Piano No. 1
BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano No. 23 in F minor, “Appassionata”

Oct 21
Cambridge, UK
Camerata Musica, University of Cambridge
Peterhouse Theatre
MESSIAEN: Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus

Oct 23
Luxembourg
Philharmonie Luxembourg
KURTÁG: Játékok
KURTÁG: Passio sine nomine

Oct 25
Vilnius, Lithuania
GAIDA Festival
BACH, KURTÁG, DEBUSSY, JULIAN ANDERSON, BOULEZ

Oct 28 & 29
Nice, France
Orchestra Philharmonique de Nice / Daniel Kawka
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

Nov 20 & 22
Tainan, Taiwan
Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen / Paavo Järvi
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

Nov 24
Seoul, Korea
LG Arts Center
Works by SWEELINCK, KURTÁG, SCHUMANN, DAQUIN, MESSIAEN, CHOPIN

Nov 27
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre
Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony / Kazushi Ono
RAVEL: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D

Nov 28
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Hall
Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony / Kazushi Ono
RAVEL: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D

Dec 7, 8, 9
Prague, Czech Republic
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra / David Robertson
MESSIAEN: Turangalîla Symphony

Dec 14
Antwerp, Belgium
De Singel, Antwerp
Tamara Stefanovich, piano
Marco Stroppa, electronics
STOCKHAUSEN: Mantra

Dec 31
Elmau, Germany
Schloss Elmau
With Tamara Stefanovich, piano

Jan 12 & 14
Lyon, France
Orchestre National de Lyon / Ton Koopman
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 4

Jan 19
Lausanne, Switzerland
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande / Jonathan Nott
RAVEL: Piano Concerto in G

Jan 20 & 22
Geneva, Switzerland
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande / Jonathan Nott
RAVEL: Piano Concerto in G

Jan 24
Southbank Centre, London
With Tamara Stefanovich, piano
BRAHMS: Sonata for Two Pianos, Op. 34b
MESSIAEN: Visions de l’Amen

Feb 2 & 3
Frankfurt, Germany
hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt / David Afkham
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

Feb 10
Paris, France
Fondation Louis Vuitton
With Tamara Stefanovich and Nenad Lečić, piano
STRAVINSKY: The Rite of Spring
DEBUSSY: Jeux
SCRIABIN: Prometheus (Transcription for two pianos by Leonid Sabaneyev)

Feb 11
Paris, France
Fondation Louis Vuitton
With Tamara Stefanovich and Nenad Lečić, piano
DEBUSSY: Études
RAVEL: Gaspard de la nuit
HONEGGER: Oeuvres de jeunesse
STRAVINSKY: Ragtime
PROKOFIEV: Sarcasms
SCRIABIN: Preludes, Op. 74

Feb 15
Groningen, The Netherlands
De Oosterpoort
CHOPIN: Nocturne in E, Op. 62, No. 2
MESSIAEN: “Le Loriot” from Catalogue d’oiseaux
CHOPIN: Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1
MESSIAEN: “L’Alouette Lulu” from Catalogue d’oiseaux
CHOPIN: Nocturne in F-sharp minor, Op. 48, No. 2
MESSIAEN: “L’Alouette Calandrelle” from Catalogue d’oiseaux

Feb 19
London, UK
“Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations”
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
LIGETI: Piano Concerto

Feb 21
Basingstoke, UK
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

Feb 22
Cardiff, UK
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

Feb 23
London, UK
“Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations”
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

Feb 24 & 25
Madrid, Spain
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

March 2–5
German tour with Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen / Matthias Pintscher
DVORÁK: Piano Concerto in G minor
March 2: Bremen
March 3: Hamburg
March 5: Cologne

March 11
London, UK
Wigmore Hall
LISZT: later works (selection tbc)
DEBUSSY: 4 Etudes
SCRIABIN: Preludes, Op. 74
OBUKHOV: Revelation
JULIAN ANDERSON: Sensation (London premiere)

March 16
Bilbao, Spain
Sociedad Filarmónica de Bilbao
SCHUBERT: Sonata No. 18 in G, “Fantasy”
BEETHOVEN: Sonata No. 29 in B-flat, “Hammerklavier”

March 21 & 22
Montreal, Canada
Montreal Symphony Orchestra / Kent Nagano
MESSIAEN: Turangalîla Symphony

March 27 & 28
Munich, Germany
Munich Philharmonic / Valery Gergiev
RAVEL: Piano Concerto in G

March 29
Munich, Germany
Munich Philharmonic / Valery Gergiev
RAVEL: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D

April 2
Newark, NJ
New Jersey Performing Arts Center
Munich Philharmonic / Valery Gergiev
RAVEL: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D

April 3
New York, NY
Carnegie Hall
Munich Philharmonic / Valery Gergiev
RAVEL: Piano Concerto in G

April 19
Heidelberg, Germany
Musikfestival Heidelberger Frühling
SCHUBERT: Sonata for Piano in G, D. 894
BEETHOVEN: Sonata No. 29 in B-flat, “Hammerklavier”

April 28
Berlin, Germany
Konzerthaus Berlin
Alfred Brendel, recitation
Works by LIGETI and KURTAG; readings from Brendel’s book of poems One Finger Too Many

April 29
Badenweiler, Germany
MESSIAEN: Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus

April 30
Badenweiler, Germany
With Isabelle Faust, violin; Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello; Tamara Stefanovich, piano
RAVEL: Ma mère l’Oye
GEORGE BENJAMIN: Three Miniatures
DEBUSSY: Sonata for Cello in D minor
WEBERN: Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 7
WEBERN: Drei kleine Stücke, Op. 11
CARTER: Epigrams

May 3
Bristol, UK
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

May 4
London, UK
“Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations”
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
BOULEZ: Notations (solo piano version)
DEBUSSY: Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra

May 7
London, UK
“Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations”
Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen
BARTÓK: Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion (with Tamara Stefanovich, piano)

May 18, 19, & 20
Cleveland, OH
Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst
LIGETI: Piano Concerto

May 23
Zurich, Switzerland
Zurich Chamber Orchestra
SCHUBERT: Sonata for Piano in G, D. 894
KURTÁG: Passio sine nomine
BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata”

May 26
Schwetzingen, Germany
Schwetzinger Festspiele
Recital: SWEELINCK, BACH, KURTÁG

May 29
Vienna, Austria
Wiener Konzerthaus
With Tamara Stefanovich, piano
Aimard:
BOULEZ: Notations I – XII for piano
BOULEZ: Sonata for Piano No. 1
Stefanovich:
BOULEZ: Sonata for Piano No. 2
Aimard:
BOULEZ: Sonata for Piano No. 3: Formant 3 (Constellation/Miroir); Formant 2 (Trope)
Stefanovich:
BOULEZ: Incises
Aimard:
BOULEZ: Une page d’éphéméride
Aimard & Stefanovich:
BOULEZ: Structures, deuxième livre for two pianos

June 6
Innsbruck, Austria
Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik
SCHUBERT: Sonata for Piano in G, D. 894
BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano No. 29 in B-flat, Op. 106

June 8
Homburg, Germany
Homburger Meisterkonzerte
J.S. BACH: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (excerpts)
SCHUBERT: Piano Sonata in G

# # #

Press Room

This Season, Pierre-Laurent Aimard Joins Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and Munich Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, Besides Headlining London’s “Salonen/Aimard: Inspirations”