“For Aimard, colour is everything when considering Des Canyons. ‘Messiaen had synaesthesia,’ he explains, ‘and his ability to evoke a combination of colours in his writing is nothing sort of remarkable. The sheer black of the night sky is heard in which there are stars. The rock formations are harmonised by Messiaen finding notes to paint purples, greens and blues. And then his love of birdsong is there throughout of course. Messiaen celebrated the fact that in the Grand Canyon were birds that could not be found anywhere else. All those birds are layered into the music, in piano writing of considerable complexity.’” – Limelight Magazine

“Yes, the early works, steeped in 12-tone technique, are steely and radical, like the first two piano sonatas. But last March at Zankel Hall, the pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich gave exhilarating accounts of these pieces on a program presenting all of Boulez’s music for piano. The Sonata No. 1 came across as a work of jarring originality, especially in its rhythmic character, as the music unfolds with nonstop intensity through sweeping bursts and organic gestures. And the staggeringly difficult Sonata No. 2 seemed more than ever a young composer’s modernist retort to Beethoven’s mighty ‘Hammerklavier.'” – The New York Times