Pierre-Laurent Aimard gave a day at Wigmore Hall to Kurtág's Játékok, the lifelong book of miniatures, dividing a selection across three recitals from morning to night.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard was born in Lyon in 1957 and studied with Yvonne Loriod, who was Messiaen’s wife and the first interpreter of most of his piano music. He won the Messiaen competition at sixteen, and at nineteen Boulez made him a founding member of Ensemble intercontemporain. He has given the premieres of Boulez’s Répons, Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XIV and two of Ligeti’s études, and recorded the first two books of those études.
György Kurtág turned a hundred in February 2026. Játékok, which translates as Games, is the sequence he has been adding to since 1973. It holds hundreds of miniatures, some a page, some eight bars, gathered into books rather than assembled into a piece. He wrote them at first for children learning to touch a keyboard at all. He continues to add to it.
Aimard gave Saturday 19 September 2026 at Wigmore Hall over to it, dividing a selection across three recitals in the morning, the late afternoon and the evening. Each lasted about an hour. Lorenzo Soulès joined him for the first. Bach and Beethoven appeared inside the sequence rather than around it. The books thinned as the day went on, and by the evening recital the music was almost entirely dedications: birthdays, letters, and pieces written in memory of named friends.
First Breath
Pierre-Laurent Aimard was joined by Lorenzo Soulès at half past eleven in the morning for Books I, II and III of the Játékok, opening on the earliest and lightest of them: Bored, Let's be silly, Toddling, The Bunny and the Fox. Two Bach chorale preludes in Kurtág's own transcription sat between the books, alongside the 8 Piano Pieces Op. 3. It lasted an hour without an interval and was the only one of the three played four-handed.
Second Breath
Aimard played alone at five o'clock, taking Book VI and the Versetti: Abraham, Cain, the Deluge, Waiting for Noah. Beethoven's Bagatelle in B minor Op. 126 No. 4 was set among them, and Kurtág's Les Adieux arrived in Janáček's manner. It lasted an hour without an interval, with entry from £25.
Third Breath
The last hour began at nine in the evening with Book IX, largely dedications: birthday pieces, medals, letters, memorials to friends. Aimard played it solo, an hour without an interval, with entry from £25. Nothing else was programmed in the hall that day beyond the three breaths.