When attending a concert by French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, expect the unexpected.

At New York's Carnegie Hall, he challenged a recital audience by programming 46 short pieces and excerpts from longer ones, making connections that ran the gamut from Beethoven and Scarlatti to modernists John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

It was a one-off, but another of his programs links the impressionist Debussy and the romantics Liszt, Rachmaninov and Chopin to the Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Ligeti, who worked closely until his death with Aimard on his prodigious etudes.

We live, Aimard told Reuters, "in a world that communicates so much, which is in permanent contact with thousands of layers of history, that is in permanent contact with every culture in the entire world".

Given that, it should come as no surprise that having mastered Ligeti's etudes -- including the fiendishly difficult "Staircase of the Devil" -- Aimard turned to Bach's monumental "Art of the Fugue" for a debut recording on his new label, Deutsche Grammophon.

When he's not playing, Aimard devises equally challenging programs for music festivals in places like Salzburg, Austria; Aldeburgh, England; Ojai, California and London -- venues so different it's hard to put them in the same sentence.

The following is an edited transcript of an interview with the 50-year-old pianist who does not bristle when it's suggested he programs for an iPod age, but takes umbrage when anyone suggests he may be doing too much.

Q: You still do conventional recitals, but why these patchworks? Is this programming for the iPod generation, where the machine picks tracks at random?

A: "Many people have told me so...and I thought, 'Oh my God I had not thought of that', and then yes, it's obvious. But...in this case, from the outside, the final result is the same but the way to find an order is for the pieces to make relations to a structure -- the whole is anything but hazard. The game here is to make stylistic relations so the audience notices this and that, so it is an educative moment as well."

Q: You do this with festival programs? How does that work?

A: "You have to think about the different audiences -- if it is Ojai or Salzburg the events will be completely different. And this is extremely interesting because you are observing the cultural world today and...we cannot be too afraid about globalization if we see how strong the identities remain and how different the audiences can be."

Q: Salzburg is in Austria and Austria means classical music, but Ojai -- an outdoor shell north of Los Angeles with crickets?

A: "It's an extremely Californian event...a couple of days in the open air in a gorgeous place, fantastic nature and an atmosphere and a way of being together that is very special. It is a lot of fun really...but this is for California where there were traditionally a lot of fantastic people for the arts."

Q: From sunny California to Benjamin Britten's Aldeburgh festival in deepest, windiest east Anglia. And you French?

A: "This is a very English festival asking a French globe trotter to take the leadership (for the 2009 season). That means they want -- on English music and on international music -- a point of view from abroad. I think this is a good moment."

Q: Why you, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, doing all this, at age 50? One music critic said you should take a break. Should you?

A: "I think there is a problem of observing someone from outside, ignoring who they are really and then judging them ...from a given normal universal model. We are not industrial objects... 

"But I feel better today. I breathe better, I think I play better, I think...I find myself better. Maybe they're (the critics) right a little, but not completely."

Pierre-Laurent Aimard's recording of Bach's "The Art of the Fugue BWV 1080" is released on Deutsche Grammophon.