Photo credit: Sim Canetty-Clarke

Concert Review: Marc-André Hamelin, 15 November 2018

During the first snowfall of New York's 2018 winter, your correspondent made the familiar trip on the 1 train down to Columbus Circle to attend a Carnegie Hall recital by Marc-André Hamelin, the Canadian virtuoso composer-pianist and likely the greatest musician that country has produced since Glenn Gould. Known both for his "brilliant technique" and "consummate musicianship" (The New York Times) Hamelin performs regularly at Carnegie Hall, often masterpieces as Debussy's Images or Liszt's B Minor Sonata.

Rain mixed with snow made for a slushy trudge to the hall; the four-block walk, while averting the eyes from the stinging flakes and treading gingerly in smooth-soled Oxfords, took close to ten minutes. Imminently before the appointed start time, perhaps only two-thirds of the orchestra level had filled; the poor weather, heavy traffic, and numerous accidents had likely delayed or discouraged concertgoers. Your correspondent luckily moved from his mildly-obstructed-view seat to the front row of the dress circle.

You wouldn't know, however, that meteorological havoc was enveloping the city if you saw Mr. Hamelin. In an all-black outfit, he calmly walked across the stage to kind applause from the New York City art lovers whose only wish was for some musical warmth after such a harrowing journey. And, though the music was interrupted by the occasional notification and phlegmy coughing, as well as today's distant sirens and squeaky boots, Mr. Hamelin delivered a surpassingly excellent performance.

The first piece was Busoni's transcription of Bach's Chaconne in D Minor, a colossal tour de force with respect to both technical difficulty and interpretive depth. Busoni's rich textures and chordal acrobatics accompany Bach's sober melodies and contrapuntal style; this potent combination coalesces into a masterpiece showcasing the virtues of two musical giants. Mr. Hamelin played with vigor and vitality, and, for a man who flirts with counterpoint only occasionally, and even then obliquely—his celebrated recordings of Godowsky's Studies on Chopin and Ligeti Etudes come to mind—he seemed quite at home, crafting the inner voices with delicacy and inflecting them with passion. In one memorable moment, the piece traverses four octaves of the piano in both hands, soaring up in ecstasy before crashing back down into one of the most devastating D Minor chords in keyboard literature. A thirty-second rest immediately before this chord is almost never given its due—in fact, until your correspondent examined the score, he hadn't known it was there—but Mr. Hamelin elongated it to a full breath, detaching both hands and sustaining pedal from the piano, and only then allowing the wave to break, its despair all the more overwhelming for the moment of pause. Some might call it egoism, but in that moment, your correspondent wished he could have leapt up from his seat in applause.

Schumann's Fantasy in C followed the chaconne, and, though the pieces are separated by over half a century, the chaconne hearkens for the past, as the fantasy deploys techniques which were only to be developed and canonized by the likes of Debussy and Reger. The opening evokes an era long after Schumann's time: cluster chords—used to create harmonic instability and almost never used until High Impressionism—are present from the very start. Following the exposition, the thoughtful, almost laconic tempo of the development provided a sharp contrast, but your correspondent finds himself wishing that the transition back to the opening theme was taken with a tad more restraint. The second movement, a technical challenge for even the greatest pianists—Radu Lupu, the septuagenerian piano legend, had a mildly disastrous performance in Bologna two summers previously— announced its presence through thundering opening chords followed by fistfuls of rhythmic sequences. Mr. Hamelin opted for a slower tempo than most other performers, but this provided a clarity and a coherence to the music that a technically competent but less considerate performer likely would have failed to provide. The final movement is at once the most peaceful and the most fantastical: it meandered through the same melodies, but with various ornamentations and variations, changing from one key to another as a chameleon shifts its appearance to fit the environment, flitting ever closer to the resolution, but ultimately ending as it began—with a burble of arpeggios and a last note that can only be described as a final breath. The work is one of the most difficult to parse in the Romantic oeuvre, but Mr. Hamelin's musicianship brought a sense of unity to this very difficult movement, and to the work at large.

Two curious selections opened the second half: the cycle Six Songs Sung by Charles Trénet by Alexis Weissenberg, and the tone poem Cypresses by Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. The songs, at turns quirky, charming, and soothing, provided a levity after the intensity of the first half: "En avril à Paris," with gently repeated chords providing muted pulses of color, called Chopin's "Raindrop" prelude to mind, while the perpetuum-mobile "Ménilmontant" held echoes of the Flight of the Bumblebee, but with a clearer, brighter melody. Cypresses, on the other hand, wandered through this idea and that motif, constantly drifting and never certain of its location. A chromatic figure appeared early on and recurred throughout the work, but it felt more like an occasional visitor than a regular friend. Indeed, nothing about this piece was friendly—cypresses are associated with graveyards in Italian custom—and Mr. Hamelin channeled the restless, unsettled atmosphere of this short masterpiece with maturity and confidence.

The final pieces of the program were late works by Chopin—the Polonaise-Fantaisie and the Scherzo in E Major. The Polonaise has one of the most recognizable openings of any keyboard work—a G-sharp Minor that immediately shifts into B major before winding up the keyboard in an ethereal halo, a pattern that repeats with other key combinations, as though trying to find solid footing on which to begin the exposition proper. But the entire piece is 1) a polonaise, or traditional Polish dance, and 2) a fantasy; between the rhythmic variation associated with the dance and the improvisational elements of the fantasy, the piece does not come to rest even once throughout its twelve-minute duration. Despite the open-ended, go-where-it-will musical idiom, Mr. Hamelin reined in all the disparate elements to provide a thoroughly compelling interpretation of a very important work. The scherzo—"joke," in Italian—is Chopin's final and most significant of the four; it possesses an evenness of temperament that belies its creator's tumultuous lifestyle. Though this performance lacked any particularly extraordinary moments—and perhaps, despite its magnificence, repeated listening over the years have worn even its most dramatic moments into relatively insignificant goings-on—Mr. Hamelin's performance was emotionally wrought and well-executed, more than we often get.

Warm applause filled Stern Auditorium; Mr. Hamelin accepted three standing ovations before first playing a quirky and rhythmic selection from Schumann's Forest Scenes, and following it with Busoni's grand Elegy no. 4, a most Busoni-esque miniature that cleverly integrates the melody of "Greensleeves." Both pieces were most appreciated.

Stepping out closer to eleven than to ten, the snow seemed to have eased up, or perhaps the radiance of Mr. Hamelin's music had a warming effect. Scarf loosely tied and coat billowing, your correspondent smiled: it was an evening well spent.

[Written 2018; lightly revised 2022]