Pianist Hamelin Breathes New Life into ‘Dead’ Composers

Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin is an archaeologist-cum-miracle worker of the piano who has almost single-handedly brought “dead” 19th-century composers back to life with his powerful, nimble fingers and keen intellect.

Although he has recorded more than 50 CDs, even the keenest followers of the piano may not know much about him because he specialises in reviving composers like Medtner and Godowsky – a world away from the household names of Chopin or Schubert.

He also is no show-off, having been described as the “least ostentatious of virtuosos”.

“There’s a certain fashion of histrionics of the keyboard which is completely foreign to what I do,” the 52-year-old Montreal native, whose father was a pharmacist and amateur pianist.

He gave a knock-out recital in the intimate Wigmore Hall – including a riveting performance of Nikolai Medtner’s Piano Sonata No. 2, a 35-minute-long musical evocation of the vagaries of the “night wind”.

“I really think that people should come to recitals and listen,” added Hamelin.

“The only reason I’m on stage is to share the music that I love, share the miracle of human creativity and cause people to rethink some of their preferences and, more importantly, expand them.”

Hamelin said his forays into the forgotten repertoire – which most recently produced a three-disc set of late works by Ferruccio Busoni for Hyperion – were thrust upon him when he won a competition at Carnegie Hall in 1985.

The recording contract that went with it required he play something American, preferably contemporary, which by definition meant obscure. His next contract, in Canada, pushed him to record the largely forgotten Polish-American Leopold Godowsky’s studies on Chopin’s Etudes.

After that it was the famously difficult Ives “Concord Sonata”, by which point, he said, “I couldn’t have recorded the standard repertoire if I had wanted to.”

Hamelin, who lives in Boston with his second wife, a classical radio presenter, does play more familiar composers, including Mozart and Haydn, and has started recording works of his own and weaving them into his recitals.

Having begun jotting notes on music paper at the age of five, Hamelin has scored critical and audience success with a set of his own etudes and a more recent series of variations on the ever popular 24th Caprice of Paganini.

His stage presence may be low key. But his own compositions can be flamboyant.

“Circus Galop” is a highly complex piece, evoking the chaos of the Big Top, written specially for mechanical pianolas, or player pianos.

It is almost impossible for an unaided human to perform – so online fans fed it through the video game ‘Synethesia’, which challenges players to keep up with piano music on their keyboards. Films of people trying and failing to play along have attracted millions of hits, but no income for the composer.

More recently he’s been encoring his own “remix” of the “Minute Waltz”, in which Chopin’s instantly recognisable melody runs headlong into a storm of note clusters and key changes worthy of Frank Zappa.

Being both composer and performer is a big help to playing the work of other musical multi-taskers – like 19th-century Hungarian composer and piano superstar Franz Liszt.

“You know much more about the inner workings of these things, you’re closer to knowing how they got put together and therefore you can analyse and then synthesise because you are more cognisant of what the composer went through,” said Hamelin.