Marc-André Hamelin LISZT - THALBERG Opera Transcriptions & Fantasies

OPERA TRANSCRIPTIONS & FANTASIES

Marc-André Hamelin / Joshua Bell / Pamela Frank / Nobuko Imai / Steven Isserlis CÉSAR FRANCK Piano Quintet

PIANO QUINTET

Marc-André Hamelin IN A STATE OF JAZZ

                                                               IN A STATE OF JAZZ

Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra / Yannick Nézet-Séguin BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 8 TCHAIKOVSKY Francesca da Rimini TURNAGE Piano Concerto (THE ROTTERDAM PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA COLLECTION 3 / 6)

This collection of previously unreleased live recordings celebrates the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra’s centenary and the ten-year residency, from 2008 to 2018, of its principal conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The Rotterdam Philharmonic, under its long-term Principal Conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin, is widely recognised as one of Europe’s most distinguished orchestras. Celebrated for its winning combination of passionate commitment, boundless energy and scintillating virtuosity, the orchestra has come a long way since its relatively humble beginnings in 1918 as a private ensemble whose members initially paid for the privilege of joining its ranks.

The arrival of Canadian maestro Yannick Nezet-Seguin in 2008 signalled a new golden era for the Rotterdam Philharmonic, as is evidenced by this outstanding set of recordings, captured live in the Doelen concert hall between 2011 and 2016 and collected together here for the first time by Deutsche Grammophon. At the end of 2017/18 season Nezet-Seguin assumes the role of Honorary Conductor, handing over the post of Principal to 29-year-old Lahav Shani.

Marc-André Hamelin NIKOLAI KAPUSTIN Piano Music, Vol. 2

Here is a disc to set the pulse racing. Nikolai Kapustin is a Russian composer who writes jazz piano music teeming with energetic spontaneity and bristling with the kind of creative immediacy one associates with improvisation (although the music is fully and meticulously written out). Kapustin is already known to the Hyperion catalogue through Steven Osborne’s trail-blazing recording of the first two Piano Sonatas and the Preludes in Jazz Style, and Marc-André Hamelin is another pianist who has for years played his music in concert. Hamelin’s legendary technical prowess and his exceptional affinity with jazz fuse to create one of the most sparkling, infectiously foot-tapping piano discs you could wish to hear.

In a recital spanning various traditional instrumental genres, Marc-André Hamelin includes two sets of studies. In terms of their stylistic breadth, formidable technical challenges and audacious invention, the Eight Concert Études (1984) hold their own against the celebrated benchmarks in the genre, from Liszt and Lyapunov to Godowsky’s re-worked Chopin. The Five Études in Different Intervals (1992) begins with a madcap study in minor seconds recalling the bouncy demeanor of Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys (although here someone has dosed poor kitty with Grade A Catnip!), and ends with an octave study to end all octave studies. Throughout, Kapustin’s bottomless well of thematic resoursefulness works overtime.

A disc to dazzle your friends with – and play “guess the composer!“

Marc-André Hamelin / Leif Ove Andsnes STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring - Concerto for Two Pianos

First a threshold question: Is there any point in listening to the Rite of Spring in its arrangement for two pianos in the first place? The answer is 'yes,' even though this necessarily monochrome version (compared to the orchestral original) can’t possibly capture the impact that Stravinsky achieves simply through piling on the timbre of the full orchestra. What it does reveal, though, is a harmonic clarity and a focus on melody that makes certain sections, especially the climaxes, sound very different than they ordinarily do—more linear, more lyrical, less strenuous.

Consider the 'Spring Rounds' section in the work’s first part. The orchestral version, with its crashing tam-tam and terrifying brass smears, hits you in the gut. As heard on two pianos, we can follow how Stravinsky fragments and distributes the melody in different registers, and maintains the long, lyrical line all the way through the section. It’s really a different experience entirely, equally legitimate in its way, and certainly an illuminating commentary on the composer’s technique. All of which brings us to this particular performance.

There’s no question that Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes, aside from having tripartite names in common, represent a sort of pianistic 'dream team' when it comes to music of this difficulty and complexity. Simply put, they turn in a version of The Rite not just technically astounding, but paced and interpreted as well as any of the best full-orchestra performances. There’s not a moment when you think to yourself, 'This should be faster, or slower, or lighter, or weightier.' It’s a fully realized, perfectly executed vision of the work, nowhere more so than in the latter half of the second part, where so many other performances bog down in the music’s minimalist rhythmic repetitiousness. And my God, how they tear into the concluding Sacrificial Dance!

And let’s not forget the other major work here. Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos is one of his most perfectly crafted neoclassical masterpieces. It attracts little attention these days, but here’s a performance whose crispness, elegance, and clarity (in the final fugue especially) ought to win it many new friends. The piece has received plenty of fine outings on disc previously, from the Kontarsky brothers on DG in particular, but this interpretation is special because it manages to be precise, that is 'Stravinskian', without ever sounding merely mechanical. The virtuosity of the players never draws attention to itself; rather, it gives the music an easy flow that projects a true sense of joy in the act of bringing the work to life.

The shorter pieces are nice to have, but almost beside the point next to the main items. If you take your Stravinsky at all seriously, you will need to hear this. (Classics Today)

Marc-André Hamelin SCHUMANN Kinderszenen - Waldszenen JANÁCEK On The Overgrown Path I

Marc-André Hamelin’s normally genial features cloud at the description of him as a ‘super virtuoso’. For him such apparent praise implies limitation rather than virtue. But here, in his latest disc of music by Janáček and Schumann, he shows himself a virtuoso in a deeper sense, a virtuoso in sound, colour and poetic empathy, one who, to quote Liszt, ‘breathes the breath of life’. Using his prodigious command in music of a transcendental difficulty—the Chopin-Godowsky Études, the major works of Alkan, Albéniz’s Iberia, etc—he displays gifts which show him as first and foremost a musician’s musician. In music of an elusive rather than flamboyant challenge he is a master of simplicity, of music which, in Goethe’s words, proves that it is when working within limits that man creates his greatest work. The fewer the notes, the more subtle and exposed the task. Certainly you could never align Hamelin with, say, Horowitz’s teasing, lavishly tinted sophistication or Cziffra’s hysterical bravura. He is a virtuoso in another sense.

Linking Janáček and Schumann is both a natural and an enterprising choice. The seeds of Schumann’s final collapse are already present in Waldszenen's ‘Verrufene Stelle’ (‘Place of evil fame’, where flowers are nourished by human blood rather than the sun’s rays) or in ‘Fürchtenmachen’ (‘Frightening’) from Kinderszenen. Such things lead to a more oblique sense of desolation in Janáček's On the overgrown path, the very title evocative of the past, of a time long eclipsed by bitter adult experience; reflections of despair rather than tranquillity. Janáček's failed marriage, his unrequited passion for a younger woman and the death of his daughter Olga at the age of 20 are all mirrored in music of the darkest introspection. Of On the overgrown path, Janáček wrote ‘they are of all things most dear to me’, as if he cradled his own unhappiness. How else can you explain titles such as ‘Unutterable Anguish’ and ‘In Tears’? Such tortured music was predictably greeted with incomprehension; and, like Liszt before him (the titles of his later dark-hued utterances, Nuages gris, Unstern or La lugubre gondola tell their own tale) or Fauré after him, his profoundest creations were ignored, causing him serious doubts. Thus, he wrote, ‘I no longer saw any worth in my work and scarcely believed what I said. I had become convinced that no one would notice anything.’ Admirably described (by the Janáček scholar John Tyrrell) as ‘some of the profoundest, most disturbing music that Janáček had written, their interest is quite out of proportion to their modest means and ambition’. Again, these are pieces ‘which begin disarmingly but are emotionally derailed within the briefest of spans’.

Hamelin’s subtle inflection captures all of the opening ‘Our evenings’, his nuance and musical breathing somehow beyond such an academic term as rubato, the sudden disruptions like flashes of anger flawlessly contrasted. Time and again he makes you think vocally, of the range and flexibility of a great singer. Hear him drop from mezzo-forte to pianissimo despondency in ‘A blown-away leaf', a retreat as it were from Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night. He is no less sensitive to the polka of ‘Come with us!’, a brief memory of Moravian folk dance and happier times. Again, it would be difficult to imagine a more lucid yet evocative sense of ‘The Frýdek Madonna’, with its grave chorale offset by mystical shimmering. Hamelin makes the limping steps of ‘Unutterable anguish’ like a prophecy of Debussy’s painful progression in ‘Des pas sur la neige' (Préludes, Book 1), while in the octaves of ‘In tears’ lies an uncomfortable awareness of the contradiction behind an outwardly conciliatory conclusion.

Turning to Schumann, Hamelin is no less illuminating than in his previous recordings of music where poetry and introspection are combined (Fantasie, Carnaval, Études symphoniques, etc). In Waldszenen and Kinderszenen, inwardness and an interior magic are only occasionally contradicted with extroversion; there more of Eusebius (the man of dreams) than of Florestan (the man of action) and so, once more, the emphasis for the pianist is on a primarily interior world. How often have you heard the entrance (‘Eintritt’) to Waldszenen played with such poised rhythmic life or listened to the quizzical song of the ‘Vogel als Prophet’ (‘Prophet bird’) with such a great awareness of its oddity? Here, once more, the knife-edge between composer and interpreter, between creator and recreator is held in the finest balance. And you could hardly wish for a greater sense of wonder in Kinderszenen's opening ‘Von fremden Ländern und Menschen’ (‘Of foreign lands and peoples’) or a more unfaltering poise in the concluding ‘Der Dichter spricht’ (‘The poet speaks’).

Writing to his beloved Clara regarding Kinderszenen, Schumann told her, ‘you will have to forget you are a virtuoso’. On the contrary, and returning to my opening proposition, Hamelin shows that he is a virtuoso in another and richly inclusive sense. (Gramophone)