Pierre-Laurent Aimard With Sir George Benjamin Come to The 92nd Street Y

The 92nd Street Y, New York will present Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano with Sir George Benjamin, piano, a New York premiere, at the Geffen Stage at Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10128, on November 19, 2025 at 7:30 PM. 

For his first-ever show at The 92nd Street Y, eminent pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard joins us with brilliant composer and longtime friend George Benjamin (Written on Skin) for the NY premiere of Benjamin's new work for piano for four hands.

Aimard is acclaimed for curating and bringing to light little-known compositional works. The concert begins with a short piece by modernist Russian composer Nikolai Obukhov before the Sonata for Piano No. 1 by Aimard's late friend and mentor, Pierre Boulez. The first half closes with Benjamin's Shadowlines - Six Canonic Preludes, "the first major piano work of the 21st century," wrote the Boston Globe. Aimard also has a long-standing history with the music of Ravel - a modernist in his own era - and opens the concert's second half with the composer's Le Tombeau de Couperin. Benjamin's extraordinary new composition for himself and Aimard, DIVISIONS for Piano Four Hands, concludes the program.

Classical music at 92NY received major support from Marshall Weinberg. This program is part of Tisch Music.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is widely acclaimed as an authority on music of our time while also recognized for shedding fresh light on music of the past.

This season, Aimard celebrates the 100th birthday of longtime friend and collaborator György Kurtág with recitals at the Budapest Music Center, Philharmonie Luxembourg, and as part of his residency with Madrid's Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical. J.S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, is also a season mainstay, following the October release of Aimard's recording, 11 years after the success of his Book I release. Scheduled performances include Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, London's Southbank Centre, Konzerthaus Dortmund, Stockholm Konzerthaus, Seattle's Benaroya Hall, Chamber Music Detroit, and the Boston Celebrity Series. Aimard's recital schedule includes performances at the Louvre, in Taipei, Beijing, and Shanghai. He makes solo appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Berlin and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestras, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Concerto Budapest Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hamburg, Barcelona, São Paulo State, and Singapore symphony orchestras.

Aimard has enjoyed close collaborations with leading composers and given many notable premieres, most recently DIVISONS for piano four hands by George Benjamin, which he repeats in the 2025/26 season at 92NY, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and London's Wigmore Hall. He also continues his associations with regular chamber music partners, most notably Isabelle Faust, Jörg Widmann and Jean-Guihen Queyras, touring with Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time.

In 2025 Aimard released Kurtág: Játékok, the latest in a series of critically acclaimed collaborations with Pentatone. It follows Schubert: Ländler (2024), the complete Bartók Piano Concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (2023), Visions de l'Amen (2022) with Tamara Stefanovich, Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata & Eroica Variations (2021), and Messiaen's magnum opus Catalogue d'oiseaux (2018),which garnered multiple awards.

Aimard is recognized as an innovative curator and significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age. Previous residencies include the complete cycle of Beethoven's piano concertos for Musikkollegium Winterthur, groundbreaking projects at Porto's Casa da Musica, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Konzerthaus Vienna, among others, and as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, 2009 to 2016.

Honors include the International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, recognizing a life devoted to the service of music, and the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, Denmark's most prominent music award. In 2020, he re-launched a major online resource in collaboration with the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Explore the Score, which centers on performance and teaching of Ligeti's piano music.

George Benjamin studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen and then worked with Alexander Goehr in Cambridge. Since that time, his works have been programmed by major orchestras and opera houses across the world.

Benjamin has written four highly acclaimed operas with author Martin Crimp: Into the Little Hill (Festival d'Automne in Paris, 2006), Written on Skin (Aix-en-Provence Festival, 2012), Lessons in Love and Violence (Royal Opera House, 2018) and most recently Picture a day like this whose premiere he conducted, again in Aix, in 2023.

In June 2025 Benjamin performed the world premiere of his new work for piano four hands, DIVISIONS, at the Boulez Saal in Berlin with his great friend Pierre-Laurent Aimard. During the 2025/26 season they will repeat the work in London, Washington, D.C., and New York. They will also collaborate in Munich at a Musica Viva concert with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In spring 2026 he will conduct the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie on tour in both Italy and Germany. At the Southbank Centre in London, he has performances with both the London Sinfonietta and London Philharmonic, the latter being a highlight of his first season as the orchestra's new composer-in-residence.

Over many years he has developed a particularly close association with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, who played under his baton for the premieres of his Concerto for Orchestra at the BBC Proms as well as Written on Skin and Picture a day like this. Benjamin has also enjoyed a strong relationship with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Ensemble Modern over many years.