At the age of twelve, Pierre-Laurent Aimard began his studies at the Lyon Conservatory.
Scores of new music are often labyrinthine, sometimes they look like large open spaces with individual dots, sometimes as a kind of lump formation in the form of notes. Nothing for first sight players. In these cases, there is often a request for specialists. Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard has been regarded as such for many years. But the French has little use for such a label: “Musicians should push boundaries and want to cross them – this also includes new music, which is a great challenge and at the same time builds bridges with the old, the roots.”
Wanderer through the ages
Aimard, born in Lyon in 1957, comes from a family of doctors. He studied first in his hometown, then in Paris, among others with Yvonne Loriod, wife of Olivier Messiaen. So he knows this music from an early age. The fact that Aimard won the Olivier Messiaen international competition in 1973 – at the age of 15 – and increasingly became Messiaen’s lead performer doesn’t seem surprising given his training.
His stay in the Intercontemporain Ensemble also had a formative effect and the works of Boulez and Ligeti became more and more familiar to him. “I’ve always wanted in my life to be a wanderer discovering new lands.” They are different eras for him. Aimard, who has long opened the traditional repertoire to Bach, never chose the easy way, but saw the New Music as an essential contribution to his artistic activity – until today.
A show by Christoph Vratz.
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