Review – Pierre-Laurent Aimard at Aldeburgh Festival 2026

Why have one piano for a concert when you could play on four instead? Pierre-Laurent Aimard, former artistic director of this very festival, had budget for two grands and a couple of uprights, with additional spend on a celeste. The instrument count is worth noting: this was expensive theatre for seventy-five minutes.

The programme notes offered an intellectual frame — two composers mastering concise forms a century and a half apart, same corner of Europe, same domestic scale. Plausible enough. Just. The execution was something else. Aimard moved between Kurtag’s hyper-focused notations and Schubert’s tuneful Ländler (with a brief sojourn for Schoenberg) in rapid succession, a programming logic that might be read as a subversive comment on the concert hall’s habit of sandwiching the unfamiliar with the reassuring. The effect was to frame Schubert as naive, and the brain’s appetite for pattern as something embarrassingly first year. Kurtag demands to be heard whole; broken into fragments between waltz miniatures, his meaning is dispersed and flattened.

Aimard moved slowly between instruments, turning each page on the music desk with a deliberateness that read as something advised in an email. He paused to peer at the soundboard of the self-playing piano before sliding across to the celeste — attentive, studied, and faintly am-dram. This raised a question that hung around for the rest of the concert like a weird uncle sitting in the corner at an ill-thought out family get-together: was he actually playing the self-playing piano at the outset, or was the audio coming from speakers distributed across the space? And if the musician isn’t in the room and the mechanism is getting on with its own thing, what role does the audience now play in Britten’s Holy Triangle — the union between composer, performer, and listener that this studio was built in part to honour?

This question gained more weight when Aimard left the stage with the self-playing piano still sounding. After a short while he reappeared at the back of the Britten Studio, at an upright few had noticed was there. A reveal, or an insertion? Aimard stepping into the frame of the performance felt incongruous given how so many other artist make pains to distant themselves from theirs.

Those who knew Aimard sniggered reverently. Those who didn’t may well have rolled their eyes. Both left the Britten Studio convinced they had experienced art.