Andre 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.

Even though Marc-André Hamelin is world-renowned for his astonishing virtuosity and a massive repertoire of the most demanding piano works, including those of Scriabin, Godowsky, and Sorabji, he has startled many with his sudden turn toward the placid domain of Classical music. First came his critically acclaimed recordings of Franz Joseph Haydn's keyboard sonatas, which were surprise best-sellers for Hyperion, and here he offers a double-CD of the piano sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with a handful of short pieces to round out the discs. Since Hamelin's fine reputation precedes him, suffice it to say that these are among the most meticulously played and wittily interpreted renditions of these pieces ever recorded.

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 Reger concerto has a formidable reputation—dense, harmonically complex and with far too many notes for the average pianist. Who better then to decipher it than Marc-André Hamelin? In his hands this rarely recorded behemoth reveals both passion and a lyricism so often lost in lesser performances. He is wonderfully partnered by Ilan Volkov and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester who share the pianist’s desire to elucidate an often misunderstood work.

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.

If, as Liszt himself dubbed it, ‘Hexaméron’ is ‘a monster’, it’s a monster which certainly holds no terrors for Marc-André Hamelin, and the encounter between them makes for some thrilling pianism. The remainder of the recital—high-octane transformations of nineteenth-century operatic favourites—is every bit as electrifying, from a musician who never ceases to astonish whatever the repertoire.