Marc André Hamelin

The music of C P E Bach makes complex stylistic demands of the performer like little else of its time, the extraordinary drama and intensity tempered by Enlightenment elegance and the influence of the Baroque. Marc-André Hamelin’s performances set new standards in this endlessly absorbing repertoire.

Marc-Andre Hamelin's first solo Alkan recording (CDA66794) met with the most superlative critical reception imaginable (culminating in Fanfare magazine's "one of the best releases of anything to have been made, a classic of the recorded era"). This follow-up proves to be no less spectacular. The disc is framed by two of the 'monster' works for which Alkan is notorious. The four movements of the Symphony for solo piano are taken from his magnum opus, the 12 Studies in the minor keys Op 39. This piece has become one of Alkan's best known but never has its finale (once described as a 'ride in hell') been so spectacularly thrown off.

These two works are undoubtedly the greatest of the forgotten concertos we have not previously tackled and have been much requested. Both were written by hugely successful virtuoso pianists who were also composers, and both had a major place in the nineteenth-century repertoire, only falling from favour in the 1920s as modernism found its place in the concert hall.

The two piano concertos of Shostakovich, though strikingly different from each other, have both become twentieth century classics. The first has long been one of Marc-André Hamelin's 'party pieces.' Hyperion was pleased to have the opportunity to pair him with Andrew Litton, a conductor who knows these works backwards and forwards (he has even recorded the second concerto as pianist). The resulting performances have a vitality and flair which places them amongst the greatest ever put to disc. The Shchedrin concerto, though less well-known, is no less enjoyable. There is brilliance in both the piano writing and the orchestration and the surprise addition of a jazz trio in the finale - including vibraphone and drum kit - is sure to bring the house down.

This album's program represents one phenomenal composer-pianist's homage to another. Marc-André Hamelin has long been a champion of the music of Samuil Feinberg. Hamelin's performances are sensitive to all it's shadows and anxieties while being fully equal to the prodigious technical demands.

Fête Galante, a 1999 release featuring soprano Karina Gauvin and pianist Marc-André Hamelin, won numerous awards, and the outstanding performances on this 2011 reissue confirm how well-deserved those honors were. Gauvin has an exceptional voice – clarion-bright, warm, confident, and agile, with a variegated palette of colors – and her effortlessly incisive interpretive skills give depth and life to everything she sings. The distinctiveness and character she brings to these songs show a terrific grasp of the genre of the mélodie, from the late 19th century songs by Fauré and the young Debussy to the mid-20th works by Poulenc, Honegger, and Émile Vuillermoz.