When San Diego welcomes über-pianist Marc-André Hamelin’s local return on Jan. 17 and 18 for Brahms’ first piano concerto with the symphony, it’ll be with full knowledge of his versatility as a performer.
In his five odd San Diego appearances over the past decade, the Montreal native has wowed in everything from solo recitals, concertos,and chamber concerts to a San Diego Symphony multimedia deep-dive on Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition moderated by Hamelin in 2016.
But versatility, impeccable technique, even unfailing musicality aren’t truly what sets Hamelin apart from other first-tier pianists. For piano nerds, Hamelin’s real claim to fame is his decades-long celebration of the range and variety of the keyboard repertoire. Since his first disc in 1988 — etudes and other works by the then mostly unsung Polish-American composer Leopold Godowsky — Hamelin has been championing the unjustly forgotten and the frankly never-known.
After Hamelin re-discovered Godowsky that composer enjoyed a recording boomlet in the 1990s, and Hamelin went on to record even more off-radar composers like Kaikhosru Sorabji, Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté, Nikolai Roslavets, Samuil Feinberg, and — freshly in the can this past November — Radamés Gnattali.
Add to these unknown names the many well-respected but nevertheless non-canonical composers that Hamelin’s recorded (Medtner, Ornstein, Busoni, Reger, etc.) and Hamelin’s sizable catalog of stalwarts (Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin) and Hamelin’s true distinctiveness is incontrovertible. If not for him, a treasure trove of musical nuggets would linger in obscurity.
Why does Hamelin bother? One reason is clearly his pharmacist father, an amateur pianist who also loved neglected repertoire. But in a recent Zoom call from Boston, Hamelin traced his excavatory mission back to natural curiosity.
“From very early on, even though I was schooled on the standard repertoire, I’ve always had a tendency to look left and right, away from the center,” he said. “And the more you do this, the more you realize that the piano repertoire is practically infinite.”
Hamelin is not only a rummaging hoarder of scores, some quite rare, but communicates with a global network of sleuthing comrades. One German friend’s collection of rare piano music PDFs “has reached, I think, over 77,000 items,” Hamelin marvels. “A lot of it is insignificant, forgettable, will not have stood the test of time, out of fashion, or junky or bad. But to me it’s a fabulous opportunity to possibly expand my repertoire. It’s a wonderful playground, full of wonder, also full of disappointments, but every so often you find a real gem.”
As much as he enjoys the search, Hamelin doesn’t chase down these musical rabbit holes for their own sake. “I have to love the music, but I have to be sure that it will be relatable by the audience. That’s my prime concern, always the audience. I mean, I don’t play for myself, okay?” he said.
He plays for listeners and, on some level clearly, for the forgotten composers themselves. His main aim as a pianist “should be to say something and be as true to the composer’s wish as possible. And that can be a tall order.”
After ninety-two recordings — the vast majority on Hyperion (“they have really built and sustained my career; it’s not an exaggeration”) — and eleven Grammy nominations, Hamelin can now record “according to personal preference,” he admits. Perhaps no other pianist, living or dead, has recorded a greater range of under-appreciated music.
But don’t ask Hamelin to admire his own career achievement. “I can’t spend too much time in contemplation,” he said. “If I have made at least a small dent as far as people’s appreciation of this repertoire, I don’t know what more I can do. I’m more interested in forging ahead, new projects that might benefit listeners.”
His most recent released recording, Found Objects / Sound Objects, perfectly captures Hamelin’s zest for the undiscovered. Of the seven featured composers, only two, Frank Zappa and John Cage, can be considered household names (depending on the household). Three – including Hamelin (his own Hexensabbat) — are by living composers, the remaining two (Stefan Wolpe’s Four Studies on Basic Rows and Salvatore Martirano’s Stuck on Stella) by envelope-pushing twentieth-century American composers whose music’s lack of renown is belied by their quirky quality.
As a composer, Hamelin has been crafting and recording his own music for decades. In 2016, he performed his Four Perspectives for cello and piano in San Diego and his piano quintet here six years later. In 2017 his Toccata on L’homme armé was a required competition piece for all thirty contestants at the elite Van Cliburn competition — over which Hamelin presided as a jurist (“the performances were never less than very good,” he recalled).
But when asked about his compositional alter ego, Hamelin flashes effacing modesty. “It will never be my main activity,” he explained. “I would never have the time or the desire, really, to delve into symphonic music or an opera or anything like that. I’m mostly a miniaturist, because that’s what’s within my capability. But I still always find the feel the need to do it.”
Hamelin displays similar restraint when discussing the merits of his embrace of recherché piano repertoire. “Some of my colleagues restrict themselves as far as repertoire, but I respect that because it shows focus,” he said. “It shows a great desire for betterment. And maybe some of them don’t learn music quite as easily as others. But that’s fine, too. What really matters is what message they express.”
Though at 64 years Hamelin admits “some things don’t come quite as easily as they used” and “there’s some repertoire that I’m just not willing to do anymore,” his passion for music and his instrument are still ravenous.
“It’s become more and more apparent to me over the years that a piano, this black and white instrument, can produce every color under the sun and can reproduce, at least ideally, any adjective in the dictionary,” he said. “Though it’s referred to sometimes as a percussion instrument, to me it’s perfectly capable of rivaling an orchestra as far as expressive possibilities.”
As a vehicle for expressive range, the Brahms’ piano concerto in D minor — Hamelin’s subject along with Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony in a “heroic monuments” program Jan. 17 and 18 — has few peers, from the stormy drama of its first movement and the prayer-like calm of the second to the muscular defiance of its concluding Rondo: Allegro non troppo.
Reminded that he once named Brahms’ concertos as among the handful of pieces he plays best, Hamelin demurs: “Well, I felt that certainly about the second concerto, which I’ve been playing for almost 40 years. The first concerto I’ve only been playing for about maybe 10 or 12 years, but it feels settled in my repertoire, and it’s grown to the stage where I can consider it” — he pauses for effect — “a friend.”
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