Anyone who has witnessed Marc-André Hamelin play Godowsky’s fantastical inventions on Chopin’s études or the mammoth Alkan solo symphony knows the feeling of a jaw grown sore from dropping. The pianist’s incredible feats of dexterity, memorization and musical élan are dazzling, and yet — perhaps in a greater testament to his talents — a listener almost forgets these complications and simply marvels at the music’s strange beauty.
Something like the converse happens when Hamelin plays a more familiar Haydn sonata or Debussy prelude: like a diamond cutter with soul, he enables the listener to hear the kaleidoscopic richness of the music anew. He is not only a pianist’s pianist; he is a music lover’s pianist. Over the past two decades, Hamelin seems to have done more to expand the keyboard literature and its interpretation than any other pianist. He made his name by performing and recording repertoire — Medtner, Catoire, Roslavets, Sorabji, Kapustin — that other pianists wouldn’t or couldn’t play. Building inexorably since 1994, his beautifully produced discography for the British label Hyperion has come to be a modern treasure. It includes concertos by Busoni, Marx, Scharwenka and Korngold, as well as Bernstein and William Bolcom; plus more solo music from Scriabin, Grainger, Dukas, Ives, Ornstein and Villa-Lobos, not to mention Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!. In recent years, Hamelin has also essayed more standard literature, including Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and Albéniz.
Born in 1961 in Montreal (and now living in Boston), Hamelin’s catholic tastes were fostered by an amateur-pianist father who introduced him to exotic scores. On a day off in Newark between performances of Richard Strauss’s Burleske with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Hamelin spent an afternoon talking with Listen about past pianists he admires (Samuel Feinberg, particularly his detailed, “composer’s take” on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier) and dislikes (Sviatoslav Richter, for his “unrelenting gloom”), as well as his appreciation for sonic collage and “outsider art” in popular music. But the main discussion focused on six of Hamelin’s key recordings, from famous repertoire through the more obscure to his own compositions.
Liszt: Sonata in B minor, et al
(Hyperion, 2011)
Hamelin’s contribution to Liszt’s bicentennial includes an album of the ever-totemic Sonata in B minor, Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H, Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude and Venezia e Napoli. Even with Hamelin’s long relationship with Hyperion, the pianist had to persuade the label that yet another take on the B minor Sonata was worth it. Hamelin explains: “Mine is the fourth in their catalog, after those by Stephen Hough, Nikolai Demidenko and Leslie Howard, who has recorded Liszt’s every note for Hyperion. But somehow I talked them into it.
“The B minor Sonata I’ve known since I was very young, yet it wasn’t until 2009 that it felt like the right time to tackle it. A few years before, the BBC requested it for a studio recital, but I chickened out. It’s one of those familiar works, like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, that people come to hear for what the pianist is doing with it as much as for the music itself. I thought I might feel the eagle ears of the listeners too much. But now I’m confident in presenting the piece as I hear it. When it came time for coming to grips with the material, I had the score so in my head that I could practically play it by ear. The challenge was figuring out its aesthetic and emotional direction. In certain performances I’ve heard, the piece becomes discursive, not allowed to speak directly. It helps to liken musical discourse to literary discourse — to the evolution of a story. Then it becomes easier to present something coherent, to not lose the listener. Whether the story I’m trying to tell will please everyone, that’s another question. But I have found that trying to please everyone is the surest way to insanity.
“The view of Liszt remains pretty onesided. People still generally associate him just with virtuosity. But if you look closely enough, it is hard to deny that he is one of the most original musical creators ever: he invented the symphonic poem, and he revolutionized musical form and harmony. For someone like Wagner to acknowledge Liszt’s influence, that says a lot. Not everything is great; there are things he wrote that are repetitive rubbish. But if you examine a long cross-section of Liszt’s works, it is astonishing how little he repeated himself. He was constantly finding new ways of making the instrument sound, new ornamentation, new passage-work. His imagination was always working, breaking new ground.”
Reger: Piano Concerto in F minor/R. Strauss: Burleske
With the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra;
Ilan Volkov, conductor
(Hyperion, 2011)
For all his connections to Austro-German tradition from Bach on down, Max Reger (1873-1916) has long stood as one of history’s least-loved major composers, a complexity-obsessed “Brahms on steroids.” The critical mauling of his Piano Concerto — despite its Largo of dark-hued, affecting lyricism — broke his heart and tainted the piece for decades. Rudolf Serkin championed the concerto, recording it in 1959, but the work has remained a curio, unlike Strauss’s early, glittering Burleske, a more popular homage to Brahms.
