brimming with youthful energy and Haydnesque, impish wit...Aimard brings fluent delicacy to the concertos and the orchestral soundings. He is matched in filigree precision by co-protagonists, percussionist Colin Currie, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under conductor Oliver Knussen. Carter’s very last, centenarian works...prove concise, poetic and delightfully mischievous as ever.

Elliott Carter’s music retained its intellectual grip right to the end and an all-star line-up of performers — pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, violinist Isabelle Faust, percussionist Colin Currie, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen — does it proud.

No one hearing the pieces on this disc is likely to doubt their technical finesse or expressive refinement: qualities that go a long way towards the defining of ‘lateness’ in artistic terms...[Aimard] tackles this always demanding pianism with alacrity and perception...There are unlikely to be any better discs of contemporary music this year.

[Aimard] is stunning in his execution of the extreme demands placed upon him, not least in works such as Dialogues, Soundings, and Interventions... it’s a highly impressive tribute to a composer whose compositional powers remained undiminished even as a centenarian.

The pieces here provide a perfect introduction to the spare, regularly surprising world that Carter’s last works inhabit...No one has been a more committed champion than Oliver Knussen, and he conducts all the orchestral pieces here with his familiar feisty clarity. Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the equally quick-witted soloist in the piano works.