****Welcome to our listing, thanks very much for looking!
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957) is a French pianist.
Aimard was born in Lyon, where he entered the conservatory. Later he studied with Yvonne Loriod and with Maria Curcio.
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 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, 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.
Aimard has recently extended his musical activities to conducting, 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.
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. He appears in the 2007 film Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037.
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, as well as in Asia and throughout Europe, and is a part of the Goethe-Institut catalogue.
Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus is a suite of 20 pieces for solo piano by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992). The work is a meditation on the infancy of Jesus, and the French title translates roughly as "Twenty contemplations on the infant Jesus". It was composed in 1944 for Yvonne Loriod, and its performance requires about two hours.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard's recording of Olivier Messiaen's landmark 1944 cycle, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, is quite simply one of the most astonishingly fine performances of piano music you're ever likely to hear. Messiaen died in 1992, but his musical vision was a truly millennial one. His enormous -- and enormously challenging -- works for orchestra, organ, and piano, not to mention his epic opera Saint François d'Assise, each encompass an entire world, if not a cosmos. Messiaen's inspiration was specifically (and devoutly) Catholic, but regardless of the listener's faith, this incandescent music communicates the spiritual mysteries that fascinated the composer. No pianist aside from Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Loriod, who made daunting recordings of his work, possesses such authority in his music as Aimard, a student and friend of both Messiaen and Loriod. Aimard must share equal credit with Messiaen for the seemingly limitless scope of sonic colors that are coaxed from the piano during the two-hour span of these 20 contemplations (literally, gazes) upon the infant Jesus. The thundering roars of the bass in the sixth movement, "Par Lui tout a été fait," the jangling carillon in "Noël," and the interlocking birdsongs in several movements all linger powerfully in the memory, but most impressive of all are the shafts of light, hard and glistening like diamonds, that echo and refract through the central section, "Regard de l'Esprit de joie." A lesser pianist -- or a less sturdily built piano -- would be pushed well past the breaking point, but Aimard's success in both the athletic and the tender parts of the score is complete. Alongside Aimard's equally stunning account of György Ligeti's piano etudes, this release must rank as one of the essential recordings of 20th-century piano music. Until you've heard it, you really don't know what ten fingers and a piano are capable of.
One ought to begin any review of the Vingt regards by discussing how well the pianist conveys the cycle's visionary awe and builds its disparate sections into a true cycle. But here the virtuosity is so remarkable that I could well imagine even listeners with a profound distaste for Messiaen - for whom the 15th Regard ('The kiss of the infant Jesus') is a by-word for sentimental religiosity - listening open-mouthed. Sheer virtuosity is an important part of the cycle's language: one of the functions of Regard No 6 ('By Him all was made') is to astonish, and the power and excitement of Aimard's playing are indeed astonishing: I don't recall ever hearing those hurtling runs executed more fearlessly.
Virtuosity is also desirable if Messiaen's demands for a huge palette of colour and orchestral or super-orchestral sonorities are to be met. In No 14 ('The gaze of the angels') his notes evoke 'powerful blasts of immense trombones' and Aimard's prodigious range of timbre and dynamic provide just the sound that Messiaen must have imagined. It is the same with the 'gongs and oboes, the enormous nasal consort' of No 6 ('Gaze of the prophets, shepherds and wise men'). In the penultimate Regard ('I sleep, but my heart is awake'), Messiaen makes a more extreme demand: that in the hushed coda the player should recall a passage from the Fioretti of St Francis where 'the angel drew his bow across the string and produced a note so sweet that if he had continued I should have died of joy'. Here the effect is suggested not by virtuosity but by intense concentration, stillness and purity of colour.
Even 'The gaze of time' (No 9), that austere exercise in rhythmic canon, emerges as strange but gripping, and 'The kiss of the infant Jesus' is no less sweetly radiant for its florid tendrils being so frankly Lisztian. Could it have been a little slower, still more rapt? Possibly; Aimard's overall timing is faster than most (nine minutes shorter than Messiaen's specified duration) and a few of his silences could have been held longer, but his dazzling echnique and fabulous range of colour make this the most spectacular reading of the Vingt regardsyet.
We are spoiled for fine accounts of it: Joanna MacGregor, Peter Hill, Haakon Austbo, Michel Beroff and of course Yvonne Loriod are all excellent, but those who try this one will find that its recording has as huge a range as Aimard's playing.’ - Michael Oliver
Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus (Twenty Ways of Looking at the Infant Jesus) is just that--20 intense miniatures in which the composer explores his religious, spiritual, and musical convictions. Over the course of its two hours, you'll hear birdsongs, a bit of Liszt, and plenty of dissonance, along with some genuine moments of tenderness and even sensuality. It's easily Messiaen's greatest work for the piano, and playing its many facets effectively is a challenge few musicians have accomplished. Despite stiff competition from Hakon Austbo and the composer's wife (Yvonne Loriod), Pierre-Laurent Aimard delivers what is undoubtedly the finest recording to date of the piece. Aimard, who studied under the composer and Loriod herself, rises to the difficulties of this work and all its tonal colors. He's rhythmically precise, yet he brings out the subtleties of the music as well. Messiaen's great work has never sounded better, due in part to Teldec's great recording, but mostly to Aimard's versatile playing. An impressive release and a must-have for Messiaen lovers. --Jason Verlinde
Olivier Messiaen’s monumental work Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus) surely ranks amongst the “greats” of the piano repertoire, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas in terms of its scale, variety and pianistic challenges. It is one of the most ground-breaking works in 20th-century piano music, a work which has accrued iconic status and deep respect. It combines richly-hued romanticism and the spare modernism that influenced Messiaen’s pupil, Pierre Boulez, and reveals many of Messiaen’s preoccupations and interests – birdsong, eastern rhythms and instruments, cosmology, religious iconography and his own deeply-held Catholic faith.
That such a work was created at a time of great human suffering, and personal privation (it was composed in 1944, when the German occupation of Paris was in its closing stages), yet expresses such joie de vivre, conviction, love, hope and ecstasy makes it all the more remarkable. It is music that puts listener and performer in touch with something far greater than ourselves, and yet one does not need to have religious faith to appreciate the enormity and emotional breadth of this work.
Messiaen has an unerring ability to “ground” the music through the use of recurring motifs, themes and devices, in particular his beloved birdsong. These elements provide musical “signposts” for the listener and also give this tremendous work a cohesive, comprehensive structure – and it is only by hearing the work in one sitting, as opposed to listening to individual movements from it, that one can fully appreciate Messiaen’s compositional skill and vision. Like a great symphony, the work moves inexorably through its movements towards its ecstatic finale. The individual movements, with their special titles and Messiaen’s own short, poetic explanations, are like staging posts in the story of Christ’s birth, musical “stations of the cross”, if you will, leading to a conclusion which is both terrifying and redemptive.
Silence also plays a significant part in the music, never more so than in the penultimate movement (“Je dors, mais mon cœur veille”) where the sonorities, resonance and sound-decay of the modern piano are utilised with highly arresting effect. Birdsong plays a meaningful part in many of the movements and it is used melodically rather than for pure effect (in this performance the pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard found musical sense, rather than mere decoration, in the birdsong figurations). There are even references to Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”, a joyous, jazzy outpouring in Regard X (“Regard de l’Esprit de joie”/Gaze of the Spirit of Joy).
At two hours in length, it is not for the faint-hearted, and it takes a special kind of performer who has the physical and emotional stamina to undertake its immense technical and musical demands. The expressive sweep of the work is vast, from the intimate, aching tenderness of “Regard de la Vierge” to primal brutality of “Par Lui tout a été fait” and the concentrated stillness of “Je dors, mais mon cœur veille”.
Aimard enjoys the special distinction of having known Messiaen personally, and he studied with Yvonne Loriod (who premiered the work in March 1945 and who became the composer’s second wife in 1961). Aimard has a long-standing and highly-respected relationship with Messiaen’s piano music and it remains a core part of his repertoire. He is also a champion of modern and contemporary piano repertoire, and as a result he brings to this music a special understanding of Messiaen’s unique approach to pitch, rhythm, sonority and attack.
His performance at Milton Court was revelatory and engrossing, not just in his ability to physically hold all the elements of the work together for two hours, displaying bravura technical and pianistic command and physical stamina, but also in his articulate and insightful approach to the music. His treatment of Messiaen’s distinctive timbres and colourful harmonies brought the music to life in vivid layers. The hushed chords and repeated right-hand octaves of the first Regard were almost whispered, before a clear bell sounded across the hall. Throughout the performance, veiled pianissimos contrasted with glittering effects high in the upper registers, voluptuous harmonies, deep bass rumblings and sparkling fiorituras redolent of Liszt at his most extrovert. Silences became moments of intense contemplation, the sound decay of the piano (a Yamaha rather than a Steinway with a sonorous, chocolatey bass) left sound waves penetrating the void, offering further pauses for reflection, while repeated motifs and passages were nuanced so that repetitions never sounded automatic or contrived. Aimard is strong and he imbues the music with a muscularity and athletic grace which preserves it from false sentiment or the stuff of chocolate-box Christmas images of the infant Jesus.
It was a performance of great virtuosity, yet never at the expense of the music, the fundamental vision of the work made clear. The entire performance was perfectly paced, Aimard’s clear sense of continuity allowing each movement to be heard as a statement in its own right, while also contributing to the cumulative and architectural effect of the whole. The interval after the glorious “Regard de l’Esprit de joie” was necessary for both performer to regroup and for audience to consider what they had just heard.
An exhilarating performance and a wholly deserved standing ovation from an audience who really cared about and appreciated this extraordinary music. - Frances WilsonThis listing is for a rare 2-CD set - a USED / OPENED, in Near Mint minus overall condition 2-CD set PRESSED and ISSUED by TELDEC of a highly collectible title, featuring -
Olivier Messiaen // Pierre-Laurent Aimard
CD Title -
Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant - Jesus
Track Listing -
1. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : I Regard Du Père - 6:08
2. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : II Regard De L’Étoile - 3:14
3. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : III L’Échange - 2:58
4. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : IV Regard De La Vierge - 5:15
5. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : V Regard Du Fils Sure Le Fils - 5:23
6. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : VI Par Lui Tout A Été Fait - 10:56
7. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : VII Regard De La Croix - 3:33
8. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : VIII Regard Des Hauteurs - 2:17
9. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : IX Regard Du Temps - 3:12
10. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : X Regard De L'Esprit De Joie - 8:11
11. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XI Première Communion De La Vierge - 6:21
12. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XII La Parole Toute-Puissante - 2:23
13. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XIII Noël - 4:00
14. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XIV Regard Des Anges - 4:54
15. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XV Le Baiser De L'Enfant-Jésus - 10:54
16. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XVI Regard Des Prophètes, Des Bergers Et Des Mages - 3:10
17. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XVII Regard Du Silence - 5:12
18. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XVIII Regard De L'Onction Terrible - 6:25
19. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XIX Je Dors, Mais Mon Coeur Veille - 10:08
20. Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jésus : XX Regard De L'Église D’Amour - 11:58
Performers on this CD include -
• Composed By – Olivier Messiaen
• Piano – Pierre-Laurent Aimard
This 2-CD set is from the TELDEC series of CDs.
The 2-CDs, JEWEL CASE AND INSERTS are all in Near MINT minus overall condition! The CD were play tested in our audio system and performed perfectly. There are no serious marks on the reflective sides of the discs that we could see, perhaps a light mark or two only.
This CD is an audiophile quality pressing (any collector of fine MFSL, half speeds, direct to discs, Japanese/UK pressings etc., can attest to the difference a quality pressing can make to an audio system).
Do not let this rarity slip
by!