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Pierre-Laurent AIMARD
piano
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"I regard Pierre-Laurent Aimard as the leading performer of contemporary piano music today. He has secured himself this outstanding rank through his technical mastery, through the poetry of his touch and the full spectrum of its shadings, and through his total identification with the spirit of each work."
György Ligeti Born in Lyon, France, in 1957, Pierre-Laurent Aimard studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he won four first prizes. As a student of Yvonne Loriod from the age of twelve, he developed a close relationship with the composer Olivier Messiaen and has subsequently become a leading interpreter of his works for piano. It was as the winner of the Olivier Messiaen International Competition in 1973 that Aimard came to international prominence. Since then, he has played throughout the world under the direction of such conductors as Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Zubin Mehta, Charles Dutoit, André Previn, Andrew Davis, and David Robertson. He made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of twenty. In 1977, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, he became a founding member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Both as a member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain (with which he played for eighteen years) and independently, Aimard takes an active role in the world of contemporary music and has given numerous world premieres. Pierre-Laurent Aimard has a deep commitment to bringing contemporary music to more classically-oriented audiences, taking great care to combine well-established compositions with contemporary pieces in his programs. He collaborated frequently with such composers as Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti and Kurtag and also encouraged and performed the work of younger composers such as George Benjamin and Marco Stroppa. Aimard also plays a vast traditional repertory both as soloist and chamber musician. He has performed with, among others, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the (London) Philharmonia, the Royal Concertgebouw, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony, the Orchestre de Paris and the Orchestre National de France. He has also been featured at the Tanglewood, Salzburg, Berlin, Vienna and Edinburgh festivals as well as at the Triennale in Köln, the Holland Festival and the Paris Autumn Festival. Aimard is married to the pianist Irina Kataeva and has two children, Marc-Antoine and Alexandra. www.harrisonparrott.com |
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