Focus on Messiaen

Piano duo performing at the world's largest piano festival! For the second time since Till Fellner's magnificent concert at Op. 353018 in 2022, our piano duo project has been participating in concerts at the Ruhr Piano Festival.

In the ‘Messiaen Focus’, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Alena Baeva (violin), Nicolas Altstaedt (cello) and Mark Simpson (clarinet), former Aimard students Jonas Olsson, Lorenzo Soulès and Tamara Stefanovich, as well as Nenad Lečić and Liga Korne performed a programme that was unsurpassed in its variety, surprise and quality, and which also left no room for the absence of powerful emotions.

In a congenial duo with Pierre-Laurent Aimard's personal concert grand piano, Op. 615313 sounded, played and sparkled, sometimes as a soloist, sometimes in a duo and also as an accompanist in the education project in a dense series of concerts in the Gebläsehalle in Landschafdtpark Nord in Duisburg.

One of the highlights of this focus was undoubtedly Messiaen's monumental work for two pianos, Visions de l'Amen, which the two exceptional artists Stefanovich and Aimard released several years ago as part of the Styriarte festival in Graz in an impressive recording.

There were also great emotions to be experienced in the education project Zusammenspiel (Interplay). Here, young pupils from different schools and of different ages danced to piano music by Messiaen, Daquin, Eisler and Bartók in front of their visibly proud mothers and fathers and many family members, most of whom were attending a concert for the first time in their lives. Tears of joy!