“It’s difficult to believe that Pierre-Laurent Aimard is not an identical twin,” writes Stuart Isacoff in Thursday’s (2/5) Wall Street Journal. “The pianist seems to be everywhere all the time, performing nearly everything in the classical repertoire. … This week he returns to New York, playing back-to-back concerts at Carnegie Hall: a solo recital in the small Zankel Hall tonight, with a program that combines music by J.S. Bach and Elliott Carter; and, tomorrow, the New York premiere, with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, of a work for piano and orchestra by British composer George Benjamin. … The pianist’s connections with George Benjamin reach back to his student days in the 1970s, when the two men both lived in the home of composer Olivier Messiaen and his pianist wife, Yvonne Loriod.” Of Benjamin’s piece for piano and orchestra, Aimard says, “It’s not technically a concerto, because there isn’t a sense of opposition between the piano and the orchestra. Because there’s more of an integration, it’s called ‘Duet.’ ” Aimard is also artistic partner with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
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