Dec 10th 2014

Hamelin the virtuoso pianist takes it easy in Bordeaux

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

Canadian-born virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin, looking relaxed and happy about his debut in Bordeaux this week, took time out between rehearsals at the city’s new concert hall, l’Auditorium, to talk about his past and what is coming next.

He will perform the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 under the direction of his friend Paul Daniel, Wednesday and Thursday evenings. 

Bordeaux is the last engagement on a two-week tour that took him to Munich, Moscow and Lucerne. At the end of this week he will stop the world and get off until Jan. 10 when he resumes his hectic schedule in Portland, Oregon.

Hamelin, one of the most respected virtuoso pianists playing today, has recorded 55 CDs for Hyperion and will bring out three more in 2014. Yet he remains little known in France. His CDs are hard to find, and only last April did he appear at his first major Paris venue, le Théâtre des Champs Elysées -- at age 52.

Now the French seem to be recognizing the error of their ways. The two leading French classical music magazines, Diapason and Classica, have selected his Hyperion three-CD box of Busoni’s late piano works as their piano disc of the year.

In a two-part interview, I asked Hamelin to look back at his early years, when he was active in contemporary avant-garde music, and to reflect on today’s piano world.

Marc-André Hamelin
by the author, Michael Johnson

JOHNSON: You have the reputation of uncovering little-known music for some of your CDs and performances. What have you turned up lately?

HAMELIN: I feel a little funny about mentioning discoveries because often there are already some recordings out there from the past. I can perhaps refresh some things, or stir the soup with a new version.

JOHNSON: You mean your interpretations?

HAMELIN: Interpretation is a big word. What I try to do is channel these pieces as I think they should be done, not impose a personal vision. Of course a little bit of my personality will show but hopefully will not stick out too much. That’s not my aim. My aim is to make the composer shine. 

JOHNSON: What might one listen for in your Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4.

HAMELIN: Listen for my cadenza. It is one of about 40 cadenzas that have been written for that concerto. In fact cadenza-collecting has become a subset of interests for score collectors. 

JOHNSON: Does contemporary music attract you? Your recordings seem to lean toward the traditional.

HAMELIN:  Thanks to my father who had a good selection of scores, I was familiar with traditional repertoire at an early age, so my next step (as a young pianist) was composers such as Stockhausen, Boulez, Schoenberg and John Cage. I’m still involved with that period. I played last year in the Cage Centennial event in Miami under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. I even did the famous 4’33” piece. At one point I was walking across the stage whistling Satie.  Among others involved were Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara and Jessye Norman. It was a lot of fun.

JOHNSON: I am told Morton Feldman will be on your mind next year as well. 

HAMELIN: Yes, Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus was supposed to be done in June but I decided to delay it so I could take a break. I have played it once in Toronto and once in San Francisco – in a private house on a very old Steinway to an audience of 30. It will probably be recorded next year.

JOHNSON: To pursue the Feldman genre almost seems you are being cast against type. Your reputation rests on virtuosity, does it not? 

HAMELIN: I don’t know. I’m attracted to extremes. I played Schubert B-flat in Munich, and it was one of the greatest musical experiences I have ever had.

JOHNSON: Yet your discography does not include music from living composers. 

HAMELIN: No, going back to contemporary music would be almost like a fulltime dedication for me. I don’t just want to do it selectively. Something like Feldman was different. When I sat down to read For Bunita Marcus I was thunderstruck. It’s a self-contained universe. As you’re playing, it becomes obvious nothing else beyond it even exists. To be able to create this is quite miraculous.

JOHNSON: Are audiences coming around? 

HAMELIN: People respond to it differently. I warned one friend he might not like Feldman. After a few minutes he got out his cellphone out and started reading The Economist on it.

JOHNSON: People will walk out of performances, no?

HAMELIN: It’s hard to walk out on Feldman. He’s so quiet. No, people generally stay. When I played it in Toronto, there were maybe two coughs in 70 minutes. Nobody left the hall.

JOHNSON: You complained in a Clavier Companion interview that young players are guilty of histrionics at the keyboard. If this is a trend, how can a controlled player like you compete?

HAMELIN: I often wonder … I must bore some people because I don’t move when I play. My contention is that people should come to concerts to listen, not to watch. I can assure you that you will not learn anything by watching me. When I watch myself on video, there’s a disconnect between what I see and what I felt at the time. It always looks effortless, like I’m just brushing the keys, but there is force at work, a lot of force. 

JOHNSON: What CDs are in the pipeline for next year?

HAMELIN: The recording and editing have been completed for Leo Ornstein Quintet with the Pacifica Quartet and another of Shostakovich with Takacs Quartet. A third will be of Mozart piano sonatas.


Part Two of this interview is available here.




     

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Oct 28th 2015
A decade ago, any mention of a choir would probably have brought Sunday morning hymns to mind. But there’s been a revolution in attitudes towards joining the local choir.
Oct 24th 2015

The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra opened its season this week with rousing performances of two works that had never before been combined on a program for Boston audiences – Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”.

Oct 18th 2015

Morton Feldman’s delicate, will o’ the wisp compositions demand of the listener a special mental and spiritual investment, a belief in music’s potential to pervade human consciousness.

Oct 9th 2015

Boston is that most musical of American cities, so there is never a shortage of recital and concert to choose from. I visit Boston twice and year and partake freely of the offerings.  Boston’s talented performers are the equal of New Yorkers, Parisians, even Berliners.

Sep 6th 2015

Not to brag, but I've stood upon some pretty rarified podiums: I've conducted "New York, New York" for Frank, "The Candy Man" for Sammy, and "Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie," for Don McLean.

Sep 5th 2015

Frank Castorf’s maintained his anti-romantic stance with his production of “Götterdämmerung” at Bayreuth on Wednesday, August 26th, and went further by giving the heroic music of Siegfried’s Funeral March and the final measures of the opera to Hagen.

Sep 3rd 2015

Perhaps Frank Castorf was in a bad mood when he conceived his production of “Siegfried” for the Bayreuth Festival –or he was just mischievous.

Aug 31st 2015

The decadence of the Nordic gods continued to be a major theme in Bayreuth’s “Die Walküre” as envisioned by Frank Castorf, who grew up in East Germany with the Marxist view of the world.

Aug 30th 2015

Two outstanding young pianists – one from Hungary, one from Italy – have been selected to become the first Oberlin-Como Fellows, two tuition-free years of study in a new partnership of the International Piano Academy Lake Como and the U.S. Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Aug 26th 2015

In the Frank Castorf production of “Das Rheingold” that I saw in Bayreuth on Friday (August 21), Wotan and company have their god-like powers, but they are just a bunch of gangster types in a low-life setting.

Aug 14th 2015

Some stage directors probably would say that it’s insane to take a full-sized orchestra out of the pit and put it on stage during an opera performance, but that didn’t stop director François Racine from doing it for Seattle Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Nabucco.” Racine also had the company cov

Aug 5th 2015

What originally got Philip Glass going as a composer was the realization that he was “living in a world where all the composers were dead. Even the living ones were dead.” He decided to do something about it.

Aug 4th 2015

WHEN I TOLD a snarky friend I was writing about the new Philip Glass autobiography, Words Without Music, she asked, “Does it go like this: I, I, I, I, I, I, was, was, was, was, was, born, born, born, born …?” Snarky.

Jul 2nd 2015

The International Tchaikovsky Competition in St. Petersburg and Moscow ended last night (July 1) in a virtual American sweep in the piano category, with gold and bronze prizes going to American-trained Russian boys and the silver to a Chinese-American player from Boston.

Jul 1st 2015

With mixed results, the San Francisco Symphony performed Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” using projected imagery and movement on June 11th [2015] at Davies Symphony Hall.

Jun 7th 2015

The Bordeaux Opéra Nationale has been packing its 18th-century Grand Théâtre for a week of sellout performances of Norma, the great Vincenzo Bellini opera on which much of his reputation rests.