Here is my Saturday July 25 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday July 23, 2009, recital by pianist Marc-André Hamelin at the Ravinia Festival's Martin Theatre.
Hamelin knows no style limits
BY ANDREW PATNER
Many pianists spend their careers trying to escape pigeonholing as specialists in certain parts of the repertoire. "Why should I be known for playing contemporary music when I also perform the classics?" they ask. "Why am I called a 'Schubert pianist' when I give French programs as well?"
For the Canadian Marc-André Hamelin, the situation is somewhat reversed. He is a complete omnivore of the repertoire, playing Baroque and modern, European and American, classics and rarities, hour-long works and miniatures. He also makes transcriptions and composes. If he has a "specialty ," it is in playing music so difficult that few of his colleagues would even try it, let alone memorize it and perform it with seeming effortlessness.
How does such an artist put even a few of his many sides into one recital? Thursday night at Ravinia's Martin Theatre, Hamelin did so by starting with a mid-career Haydn Sonata, in E-Flat Major, Hob. XVI:49 of 1789-90, which he made sound as fluid and and impressionistic as Chopin's efforts in this genre 40 or so years later. He followed this with a work whose anachronistic fluttering was the composer's own, the little-played Cypresses by the Italian-born Jewish exile Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, written in 1960.
Then came a set of pieces dear to Hamelin's heart: six songs by French entertainer Charles Trenet, improvised upon and recorded under an artful pseudonym ("Mr. Nobody") by another Jewish exile, pianist Alexis Weissenberg, in the 1950s. Hearing them recently, Hamelin made his own transcriptions from the old 45 rpm discs and is devoted to them.
The sense that they give of swimming happily through a sea of arpeggios and nostalgia fit perfectly into the mood Hamelin was both setting and seemed to be in. After intermission, he offered two of his own minor-key études, inspired by a similar undertaking by the eccentric 19th-century French-Jewish virtuoso Valentin Alkan. The first, Hamelin's take on the Goethe poem that inspired Schubert's masterful Erlkönig, pushes rhythm and mid-20th century harmony to their limits. The second, a Tchaikovsky lullaby recreated for the left hand alone, showed that Hamelin can play more sensuously and brilliantly with one hand than many other performers can with two.
After all of this neo-Romanticism, his reading of Chopin's Third Sonata, the B Minor from 1844, seemed almost overstructured, as if he were saying, "You all have thought of Haydn and Chopin backward -- let me readjust your understanding." One of his own improvised compositions, Petit Nocturne, closed the evening as an encore.
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