Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Kurtág's Játékok across three separately ticketed hours at Wigmore Hall on Saturday 19 September 2026, at 11.30am, 5pm and 9pm.
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. He is the pianist living composers write for.
György Kurtág turned a hundred in February 2026. Játékok — ‘Games’ — is the sequence he has been adding to since 1973: hundreds of miniatures, some a page, some eight bars, gathered into books rather than assembled into a piece, and written at first for children learning to touch a keyboard at all.
Aimard gives Saturday 19 September 2026 at Wigmore Hall over to it, dividing a selection across three separately ticketed hours at half past eleven, five and nine, each about an hour and sold on its own. Lorenzo Soulès joins him for the first. Bach and Beethoven appear inside the sequence rather than around it. The books thin as the day goes on, and by the nine o’clock the music is almost entirely dedications: birthdays, letters, and pieces written in memory of named friends. Kurtág is still alive and still adding to it.
First Breath
Pierre-Laurent Aimard is 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 sit between the books, alongside the 8 Piano Pieces Op. 3. An hour, no interval. It is the only one of the three hours played four-handed.
Second Breath
Aimard plays 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 is set among them, and the Kurtág 'Les Adieux' arrives in Janáček's manner. An hour, no interval, tickets at £25.
Third Breath
The last hour begins at nine in the evening with Book IX, which is largely dedications — birthday pieces, medals, letters, memorials to friends. Aimard plays it solo, an hour without an interval, at £25. Nothing else is programmed in the hall that day beyond the three breaths.