Since winning the Olivier Messiaen Competition in 1973 and then becoming a founding member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Pierre Boulez, French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard has been a champion of contemporary music. As he showed yet again in a Monday evening recital at La Maison Française, it is not just that he plays contemporary music in all styles but also that he plays it so well, so musically, with such understanding. Aimard’s recording of the…

Is Jean-Yves Thibaudet the classical pianist being overshadowed by Thibaudet the media sensation? His recent recordings have included arrangements of opera melodies, excerpts of film soundtracks, jazz, as well as more classical fare. His concert attire is designed by Vivienne Westwood, and he has homes in Paris and, of course, Los Angeles. In a recital sponsored by Washington Performing Arts Society Saturday afternoon at the Kennedy Center, Thibaudet had the chance to show Washingtonians that…

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is one of the great treasures of Washington’s arts scene, a federal museum with the guts to undertake strange and current exhibitions, along with adventurous musical programs to accompany them. So it should be no surprise that DCist was at the Hirshhorn yesterday to hear what was sure to be an excellent and interesting concert by the Norwegian pianist Håkon Austbø. With a name spelled like that, how could…

Synesthesia was a pretty big topic with arts bloggers a few months ago. For the record, it’s a clinical condition that involves the confusion of stimuli between different senses. Most importantly for our post today, some composers—Messiaen and Scriabin, to name two—have had this condition and perceived colors visually along with sounds that they heard (and, we presume, vice versa). This was the theme of a free concert that we suggested earlier this week in…