When Pierre-Laurent Aimard gives the first of two piano recitals at the Southbank Centre, the hall will be packed, and not just because of his keyboard wizardry. At 54, he still has that aura of a miraculous child who has mesmerised a string of great composers. Olivier Messiaen spotted him as a precocious student at the Paris Conservatoire when he was 12, and made him his adoptive son; when he was 19, Pierre Boulez invited him to co-found his celebrated Ensemble Intercontemporain; Gyorgy Ligeti made him the test pilot for his horrendously difficult études; Elliott Carter, centenarian doyen of American composers, is still writing for him today. But Aimard is always up to tricks, whether clowning around with Alfred Brendel (another admirer), or inserting outlandish bits of modernism in Bach performances, or sharing the stage with a bunch of Pygmy drummers to prove that the European avant-garde has no monopoly on complex metrical sophistication. It sounds like a joke that one of the... - M F