Renowned pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s recording of Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux created a sensation when first released on PENTATONE in 2018, and now returns to the market in an attractively priced stereo reissue./p>

Aimard had intimate ties to the composer himself and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, for whom Messiaen wrote the Catalogue, a grand hymn to nature from a man who never ceased to marvel at the stupefying beauty of landscapes or the magic of birdsong. With his Catalogue, Messiaen tried – in his own words – “to render exactly the typical birdsong of a region, surrounded by its neighbours from the same habitat, as well as the form of song at different hours of the day and night,” suggesting an almost scientific approach to his subjects. The idea of ‘reproduction’ may have been central to Messiaen’s conception of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux, but in the finished work we hear a great composer at work, a master of innovative structures who finds an astonishing range of piano sonorities. Thanks to Aimard’s ability to evoke this colourful opus, his interpretation has turned into an absolute reference recording.>/p>

This first release within Aimard’s exclusive partnership with PENTATONE received many accolades, including a Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. Since then, recordings of Beethoven (2021), Bartók (2023, with San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen), and Schubert (2024) have appeared on PENTATONE, as well as piano four hands albums with Tamara Stefanovich (Visions in 2022 and Nicolaou: Etudes & Frames in 2023).

Star pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard presents Ländler, a collection of delightful dances composed by Franz Schubert. Rustic and cheerful, these miniatures display a fascinating side of Schubert’s musical persona. Their simplicity is deceptive, as these dances are frequently shaken up by Schubert’s harmonic wandering soul, yet remaining lyrical, picturesque, and tuneful. For Aimard, there is a kinship between Schubert’s Ländler and Kurtág’s Játékok, pieces that he often performs side by side, sharing a combination of playfulness and Modernism that also calls the great twentieth-century miniaturist Anton Webern to mind. By avoiding almost any repetition, Aimard evokes a sleepwalker’s journey rather than a series of dances.

A renowned champion of twentieth-century music, Pierre-Laurent Aimard has released multiple acclaimed albums in his exclusive contract with Pentatone, including Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (2018) and Visions de l’Amen (2022), along with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata & Eroica Variations (2021). He also joined Tamara Stefanovich in Etudes and Frames (2023), with music by Vassos Nicolaou, and recorded Bartók's Piano Concertos with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen (2023).

Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard joins forces with the San Francisco Symphony and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen for a recording of Bartók’s complete piano concertos. A pianist himself; Bartók imbued his three concertos with multiple aspects of his compositional persona; ranging from complex and innovative (the First) to exuberant (the Second) and serene (the Third). The result is a fascinating slice of his musical life. This all-Bartók release marks the first Pentatone collaboration between Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony; an ensemble he has reshaped through creative performance concepts and expansive new media projects.

A renowned champion of twentieth-century music; Pierre-Laurent Aimard has released multiple acclaimed albums in his exclusive contract with Pentatone; including Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (2018) and Visions de l’Amen (2022); along with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata & Eroica Variations (2021). He also joined Tamara Stefanovich in Etudes and Frames (2023); with music by Vassos Nicolaou. Salonen returns to the label for the first time since his recording of Stravinsky’s Perséphone (2018); the San Francisco Symphony previously appeared on the 2005 Pentatone release Young America.

REVIEWS:

You know just within a couple of minutes these recordings are going to be special. As Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony sweep thrillingly into the First Piano Concerto’s Allegro, Pierre-Laurent Aimard luxuriates in the space they leave him on a superbly recorded disc…‘Definitive’ is a daft word to use about an interpretation. How can we truly know? But superlative this absolutely is.

-- The Sunday Times (★★★★★)

Ultimately, then, we’ve got something special here: a fresh take on some canonic works by a conductor and soloist whose bread-and-butter is this very fare. It’s an undertaking that flatters all parties involved musically, technically, and intellectually. Best of all, it draws out the latent mellifluousness of Bartók’s writing, even when, outwardly, that’s at its most hard-edged.

-- The Arts Fuse

In the second concerto I particularly admired the middle movement, with its opening on slow strings – which were silent in the first movement – and the fast toccata-like middle section generated exactly the right kind of excitement.

The third concerto is more different from the other two than they are from each other. It is mainly serene and graceful, remarkably so when one considers that it was written in wartime, in exile and when Bartók knew he did not have long to live...Aimard, slightly to my surprise, provides beautifully elegant phrasing and articulation and shows himself as much at home in the graceful writing here as he did in the much more challenging writing in the first two concertos...The recording is impeccable.

-- MusicWeb International

[Aimard] is aided and abetted every step of the way by the San Francisco Orchestra and its new(ish) music director...Salonen approaches these works as unapologetically modernist, and he has inspired the orchestra to shed the richly upholstered colors they developed under MTT for a less weighty, more severe color palette that ensures laser-like clarity even in the densest contrapuntal passages. The middle sections of concertos 1 and 2’s slow movements are particularly telling, and listen to the wind’s precision and leanness in the first concerto’s opening movement, which gives the music a mechanical brilliance. Pentatone’s engineers ensure the bass drum has plenty of impact. When Salonen conducted these concertos for Bronfman in Los Angeles, the Sony engineering highlighted that orchestra’s cinematic sound. Here we have a quite different sound palette that embraces a greater variety of hues in a true concert hall acoustic. 

Characterful...strongly recommended.

-- The Classic Review

On Etudes & Frames, pianist Tamara Stefanovich presents the music of contemporary master Vassos Nicolaou. In his Etudes, Nicolaou uses virtuosity as a means to explore forms made of complex rhythms, great speed and multi-layered sound. Each of the fifteen etudes has an evocative title and focuses on specific geometrical-choreographical movements of the hands on the keyboard, as well as on a basic acoustical idea. For Stefanovich, this set has a structural integrity not seen since Ligeti’s Etudes. Nicolaou’s etudes are paired with Frames for two pianos, on which Stefanovich is joined by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Stefanovich studied together with Nicolaou and has been an important advocate of his music ever since. Dedicating an entire album to his music is a dream come true. Tamara Stefanovich is captivating audiences worldwide with a broad repertoire ranging from Bach to contemporary composers. Etudes & Frames is her third Pentatone album, after having released Influences (2019) and Visions (2022, together with Pierre-Laurent Aimard) with the label.

Visions offers Tamara Stefanovich and Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s return to Pentatone, presenting a programme revolving around Messiaen’s intoxicating Visions de l‘amen for two pianos. This centrepiece is surrounded by Enescu’s Carillon nocturne, Knussen’s Prayer Bell Sketch and Clock IV from Birtwistle’s Harrison’s Clocks. The works performed all share a fascination for the sound of bells, and Stefanovich and Aimard invite the listener on a mesmerizing acoustic journey. Tamara Stefanovich is captivating audiences worldwide with a broad repertoire ranging from Bach to contemporary composers, and made her Pentatone debut with the critically-acclaimed album Influences (2019). Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and as a uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career. His exclusive engagement to Pentatone has led to a complete recording of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (2018) and a recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Eroica Variations (2021).

REVIEW:

Here’s a disc for pianophiles, those with a penchant for the mystical, and campanologists alike. As the song has it, “A bell’s not a bell ’til you ring it”, and here bells toll, peal, chime, carillon and knell throughout a cleverly programmed, acutely played recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich that dazzles with its poetry, intensity and clarity.

The disc’s title, Visions, alludes to the hallucinogenic effect of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen in which bells sound with an intoxicating allure that speaks of a sense of otherness rooted in self-interrogating interiority. In its searching dialogue between two pianos surface religiosity serves as the portal to something altogether more transcendental and intimate.

Aimard’s familiarity with the work is unimpeachable, having played it, he says, “from the age of 15, turned the pages when Yvonne Loriod and Messiaen performed it, worked on it with him, and played it countless times”. More recently, it has been a part of his concert appearances with Stefanovich, and such accrued acquaintanceship pays enormous dividends here.

With due seriousness and gravity, Aimard assumes the imposing first piano role originally inhabited by Messiaen himself, Stefanovich voicing the narcotic zeal and fantasy of the second piano part, written for and first performed by Loriod. The result, an exercise in atomised contrasts, is something special.

Aimard carries the disc’s adroit finale, Harrison Birtwistle’s Clock IV (from Harrison’s Clocks) inspired by Dava Sobel’s book Longitude about the race to invent a marine chronometer. One of the composer’s “chiming pieces”, it discreetly echoes Messiaen even as its prodigious chord clusters and dramatic dynamic contrasts belong self-evidently to him alone. Aimard dispatches it with due declamatory virtuosity.

Nigel Simeone provides detailed, informative, and accessible notes, the recorded sound, in Stefaniensaal, Congress Graz, Austria as exemplary as you would expect of Pentatone.

-- Limelight

After his acclaimed interpretation of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard returns to PENTATONE with a recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Eroica Variations. The Hammerklavier Sonata is one of the pinnacles of Beethoven’s creative output, and arguably one of the highest mountains to climb for any pianist. To Aimard, it poses one of the most frightening tests of a performer’s life, but one that is as irresistible as it is insurmountable. The dazzling Eroica Variations are nicknamed after Beethoven’s iconoclastic Third Symphony, and employ the melody he would later use as the main theme of the symphony’s finale. Beethoven’s fondness for this melody is evident, as he also used it in his ballet music for The Creatures of Prometheus, as well as in the seventh of his 12 Contredanses. Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and as a uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career. He started his exclusive engagement to PENTATONE with a complete recording of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (2018).

REVIEW:

Having heard Pierre-Laurent Aimard give several intense and impassioned live performances of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata over the past several seasons, his studio recording generally seems reserved and even foursquare by comparison.

To be certain, his exemplary technique allows for no vagaries of voice leading or textural misfires, while Pentatone’s production values do justice to Aimard’s tonal clarity and transparency at quieter dynamic levels. Still, there’s a pre-planned quality about nearly every breath pause, tenuto, caesura, and dynamic hairpin that somewhat dissipates the outer movements’ continuity and momentum. This is not a function of Aimard’s generally conservative tempos, although the fugal finale becomes heavier and less timbrally alluring as the music unfolds (this is true about most performances, to be fair).

Interestingly, in concert Aimard’s outer movements went for broke, while the Adagio sostenuto came off sounding relatively reserved and reticent. Here, however, Aimard’s expressive palette opens up, with a controlled freedom to the rubatos that culminates in a devastating climax. In the rising chain of broken fifths and sixths between hands just before the first-movement recapitulation (measures 224-226), Aimard reads the lower note upbeat as A-natural, rather than the so-called “inspired misprint” A-sharp, vis-à-vis Kempff, Petri, Brendel, and Perahia; I personally prefer A-sharp, as do Schnabel, Solomon, Arrau, and Levit.

Years ago during a public master class I heard Aimard spontaneously launch into a most inspired and unified reading of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor. Similar inspiration and unity abound throughout his Eroica Variations, with more than a few audacious touches.

I like the force of his right-hand triplets in Variation 2, buttoned by brash left-hand accents at phrase endings, as much as No. 5’s ruminative delicacy. In No. 6, Aimard’s suave, effortlessly dispatched broken octaves enable the offbeat accents their due without pressing the point. All the more surprising that No. 13’s triplet chords and witty melodic appogiaturas don’t match the insouciant thrust one hears from Clifford Curzon. Yet the concluding Fugue has the variety of character and articulation that I expected to encounter more consistently throughout Aimard’s Hammerklavier Fugue.

– ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Germany’s oldest Mozart festival celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2021. The present jubilee boxed set presents previously unpublished treasures from the archive of the Bavarian Broadcasting. All live recordings from the Baroque Imperial Hall at Würzburg Residence are digital remasters.

Renowned French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard kicks off his exclusive engagement to PENTATONE with a recording of Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1956-1958). The pianist had intimate ties to the composer himself and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, for whom Messiaen wrote the Catalogue.

Praised by The Guardian as “one of the best Messiaen interpreters around,“ this is Aimard’s first recording of Messiaen’s most extensive, demanding and colorful piano composition. The luxurious release set contains an accompanying bonus film, on which Aimard shares his vast knowledge of and love for Messiaen’s work from behind the piano.

Due to its radical naturalism, the Catalogue d’Oiseaux is exceptional within the repertoire for solo piano. It is the grand hymn to nature from a man who never ceased to marvel at the stupefying beauty of landscapes or the magic of bird song. With his Catalogue, Messiaen tried – in his own words – “to render exactly the typical birdsong of a region, surrounded by its neighbors from the same habitat, as well as the form of song at different hours of the day and night,” suggesting an almost scientific approach to his subjects. The idea of ‘reproduction’ may have been central to Messiaen’s conception of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux, but in the finished work we hear a great composer at work, a master of innovative structures who finds an astonishing range of piano sonorities. In a world that is increasingly being destructed by man, Aimard views this cycle as “a musical refuge that resonates with an audience ever more concerned, expanded and affected.”

REVIEWS:

Unsurprisingly, Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s interpretations are anything but tame. His dynamic range is formidable, his voicing of chords scrupulously faithful, his clarity unimpeachable. It’s hard to imagine the textures having greater impact or precision, or the continuity and discontinuity being projected with greater concentration. Nigel Simeone’s essay for Pentatone is exceptionally informative on factual background. One can only salute this outstanding achievement.

– Gramophone (Editor's Choice, April 2018)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s long association with Olivier Messiaen’s music dates back to the early 1970s, when the teenaged pianist was a protégée of both the composer and his wife Yvonne Loriod. His 2000 recording of Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus has long held sway as a version of reference. In August 2017 Aimard set down the complete Catalogue d’Oiseaux, now released by Pentatone on three SACDS, accompanied by informative booklet notes by Nigel Simone and a valuable DVD where Aimard presents succinct overviews of each piece from the piano and offers interesting insights into Messiaen’s methodology and personality.

As the set reveals time and again, Aimard has long digested and internalized Messiaen’s colorful keyboard syntax. The pianist voices and balances extended sequences of chords with the utmost clarity and specificity. Minute variations in rhythmic asymmetry are scrupulously articulated, while Aimard never shortchanges the music’s frequent moments of silence. He also brings impressive timbral and characterful variety to low-register passagework that can sound muddy or indistinct in the wrong hands. Cases in point include Messiaen’s playful evocation of mating mallards in Le Merle de roche’s opening pages, and Le Loriot’s slow-motion chords that contrast with lively high-register dialogues depicting Garden Warblers.

Le Rousserolle Effarvatte, the cycle’s epicenter and longest movement, emerges as a dramatic and virtuoso tour-de-force, showcasing Aimard’s remarkable concentration throughout sustained contemplative passages, along with his sophisticated gradations in dynamics and touch that seemingly project the gnarly, tumultuous sequences in three-dimensional perspective. To be sure, the pianist’s fortissimos convey an edgy, even metallic patina (so do Yvonne Loriod’s, in fairness), and his occasional vocal grimaces distract. Moreover, there sometimes is more humor to the music than Aimard is willing to concede.

Aimard’s technical, stylistic, and musical authority build upon Loriod’s interpretive legacy, and set modern-day standards that will both inspire and intimidate future generations of Messiaen pianists.

– ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)