Marc-André Hamelin, piano

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Born Eisenach, March 21, 1685; died Leipzig; July 28, 1750
Organ Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542 (arr. Theodor Szántó [1877-1934])
Composed c. 1720; 15 minutes

In Bach’s Organ Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542, there is both bombast and quiet reflection, a dramatic juxtaposition that appealed to the Romantic sensibilities of many 19th-century pianists. Franz Liszt wrote his piano arrangement of the work—perhaps the most frequently performed transcription today—in 1869. But there are at least another two dozen piano arrangements (including one by Max Reger), making this one of the most frequently transcribed of Bach’s organ works.

The Hungarian virtuoso pianist and composer Theodor Szántó studied in Berlin with Ferruccio Busoni (who was himself a prolific transcriber of Bach’s organ music for piano) and settled in Germany for some time thereafter. Though Szántó’s original compositions and recital programming established his advocacy of contemporary music (especially the works of his countrymen Kodály and Bartók), and a pronounced interest in non-Western music, he was also a prolific transcriber and arranger. Szántó made a popular piano arrangement of five movements from Stravinsky’s Petrushka that demonstrated his understanding of the virtuoso possibilities and coloristic effects of the piano. He also transcribed more than a dozen organ works by Bach—including the G-minor Fantasia and Fugue—performing them himself on his own demanding recital programs.

The opening of the G-minor Fantasia includes themes with starkly contrasting characters, played out in the seemingly improvised manner that was typical of Baroque keyboard fantasias and preludes. The playful four-voiced Fugue that follows is rather conservative by comparison, but its structured virtuosity still resonated with Szántó nearly 200 years after Bach wrote it. 

© 2012 Luke Howard

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FERRUCCIO BUSONI

Born Empoli, April 1, 1866; died Berlin, July 27, 1924
Sonatina seconda
Composed in 1912; 9 minutes

A child of professional musicians, Ferruccio Busoni became one of Italy’s most accomplished pianist-composers at the end of the 19th century. His lifelong dedication to Bach is evident in his series of keyboard transcriptions of Bach’s music published in 1918. But in Busoni’s original compositions, too, the spirit of Bach is frequently present.

Perhaps surprisingly, given his reverence for the past, Busoni was also a forward-looking composer and a strong advocate of contemporary composition. In 1907, he wrote his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music in which he proposed a new musical language that sought to reinterpret past traditions in new ways. This philosophy reached its zenith in 1912 with Busoni’s Sonatina seconda.

Of the six piano sonatinas Busoni published, the second is the most vigorously modern, as radical in its exploration of atonality as anything Schonberg was producing at the time. Busoni had become interested in the occult during this period of his life, and that interest in hidden, secretive structures finds its expression in the subdued quality that permeates this work. Yet it is a tautly constructed piece, relying on a dense interweaving and development of thematic material. Beginning low and quietly on the keyboard, the dark roiling creates a thick texture out of which trails of pianistic figurations occasionally stream. It is almost as if this were an impressionistic keyboard piece based on viscous black oil rather than sparkling water. At its conclusion, the work returns to the dark registers of the piano from which it had sprung.

© 2012 Luke Howard

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CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Born Germain-en-Laye, August 22, 1862; died Paris, March 25, 1918
Images, Book I
Composed between 1905-12; 8 minutes

At the end of the 19th century, when French music was just beginning to assert itself after 150 years of Austro-German domination, Claude Debussy developed a novel and thoroughly French style of keyboard composition. Debussy’s music, in contrast to that of the Germans, favored timbre and texture over form and structure. His harmonies were often non-functional, employing parallel chords, unresolved dissonances and free modulation. It was a new language for music, one that would ensure the composer’s popularity and importance.

The early 1900s were mostly happy years for Debussy. He called it his “time of spring,” just before artistic success had tipped over into full-blown fame. It was during this time that Debussy wrote a series of three short piano pieces gathered under the title of Images, published in 1905. As in the Estampes for piano that came just before, the explicit reference to a pictorial stimulus (implied in so much of Debussy’s music elsewhere) gives an indication of his aesthetic direction.

Roger Nichols writes that in Reflets dans l’eau, the first of the Images, “the rhythms of the water, symmetrical to the casual eye, but in fact full of life-giving asymmetries, the sound of the water, monotonous and hypnotic, even (in a good performance) the feel of the water, come across with a fidelity that Liszt and Ravel had not achieved.” The water of the work’s title is the deep calm of a mirror-like pond, and the disturbance of its perfect stillness initiates the musical response. Eventually the ripples reflect, intersect and intensify, until the play of light and water creates a kaleidoscope of cascading scales, tumbling figurations and whispering trills. The motion gradually dissolves as the echoes of these reflections fade into the piano’s high and low registers.

Hommage à Rameau, in the form of a courtly and somewhat melancholy sarabande, was written while Debussy was revising Rameau’s opera-ballet Les Fêtes de Polymnie. Debussy pays tribute to his 18th-century compatriot with this study in classical proportions, triadic harmonies, austere textures, and emotional reserve. Yet his own early-20th-century sensibilities emerge, as they did also in the keyboard works of Ravel and Satie, in the reinterpretation of Baroque dance forms as fragments or museum pieces from a lost era to be admired in the present.

The finale, a toccata-like piece titled Mouvement, demonstrates Debussy’s complete incorporation of rhythm into keyboard timbre, the torrent of notes being contained within a carefully controlled environment of long pedal points and slow-moving harmonies.

© 2012 Luke Howard

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CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Born Germain-en-Laye, August 22, 1862; died Paris, March 25, 1918
L’isle joyeuse 
Composed between 1903-04; 6 minutes

L’isle joyeuse was one of only two works for piano completed by Debussy in 1904 and was inspired by Antoine Watteau’s painting L’Embarquement pour Cythère. But there may have been a second, more personal inspiration as well. In the summer of 1904, just as he was reworking this piece into its final form, Debussy’s first marriage to Lilly Texier collapsed, and he decided to holiday with a new love, Emma Bardac, on the English Channel Island of Jersey. Subsequently, Debussy used the English spelling in his title—“isle” rather than the French “île”—suggesting that Jersey was perhaps Debussy’s own “isle joyeuse."

Throughout the opening passages, snatches of a jaunty dotted-note tune alternate with shimmering watery figurations. These give way in the central section to a noble melody that speaks of contentment and inward joy. The dotted rhythms and water imagery return before a series of fanfares announce the noble theme again, this time in a grand and brilliant fortissimo.

© 2012 Luke Howard

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MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN

Born Montreal, September 5, 1961
Variations on a Theme by Paganini (New York premiere) 
Composed in 2011; 10 minutes

The famous Caprice No. 24 in A minor for solo violin by Niccolò Paganini has already inspired many composers, from Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff (whose Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is probably the most famous work based on this melody) to Szymanowski, Lutosławski and Rochberg. Even Benny Goodman, Andrew Lloyd Weber and rock-guitar icon Yngwie Malmsteen have turned to it for inspiration. It has been transcribed for (among other instruments) marimba, balalaika, acoustic guitar, synthesizer and brass ensemble. In short, here is a work that can make a claim, without too much exaggeration, to true ubiquity—it might be harder to find a composer who hasn’t dabbled with it, or a style into which it hasn’t yet been transformed.

In 2011, Marc-André Hamelin decided to give it a shot anyway. Regarding his own Variations on a Theme of Paganini for solo piano he notes, correctly, that “writing anything about them would inevitably spoil the fun and give many things away.” But it’s safe to say that this eccentric, idiosyncratic, freakishly virtuosic romp does break new ground. Within a span of about ten minutes, as Hamelin observes, “it constantly tries to push the envelope as far as what may be aesthetically acceptable!"

© 2012 Luke Howard

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SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

Born Senyonovo, Russia, April 1, 1873; died Beverly Hills, March 28, 1943
Prelude in G major, Op. 32, No. 5 (Moderato) 
Composed in 1910; 3 minutes
Prelude in G-sharp minor, Op. 32, No. 12 (Allegro)
Composed in 1910; 2 minutes 

Rachmaninoff, like so many other great pianist-composers, wrote 24 keyboard preludes that covered all the available major and minor keys. It’s not certain, however, that this was his initial goal. While the prelude sets by Bach, Chopin, Hummel, Busoni, Heller, Alkan, Cui, Scriabin, Shchedrin, and Shostakovich were each conceived and written as a single collection, Rachmaninoff composed his in three installments, over a long span of time. The first, the infamous Prelude in C-sharp minor (now equally ubiquitous for its opening theme of strident chords—ed.), was published alongside some other piano miniatures in his Op. 3. Then there were the ten preludes of Op. 23, which one critic has suggested were written primarily to divert the public’s attention away from the annoyingly popular C-sharp minor Prelude. The last 13 preludes were composed and published in 1910 as Op. 32, bringing the total to 24 in all.

These Op. 32 preludes could just as easily have been titled études—they are larger in proportion than Chopin’s preludes, and more compositional in their exploration of thematic potential. Though Rachmaninoff dated the manuscripts for each of them, indicating that they were completed in the early fall of 1910, his dating is somewhat curious. It suggests, for example, that preludes 5, 7, 8, 11 and 12 were all written in the space of only two days. It’s possible the dates may refer instead to the completion or final revision of previously composed works.

Preludes 5 and 12 from this set have an added distinction—they were known to have been performed by the composer as encores after the premiere of his Third Piano Concerto in April 1910. The elegant and impressionistic G major Prelude in G (No. 5) has qualities of both a barcarolle and a berceuse. Leisurely triplets in the right hand lap gently against an arpeggio accompaniment in duple time, with short melodic fragments forming the basis for subsequent variations. In the G-sharp minor Prelude (No. 12), Rachmaninoff-as-performer shares the stage with the composer, the score copiously annotated with articulations and dynamics that suggest his own performance markings of the piece. One of the most frequently performed of the Op. 32 preludes, this work trembles with dramatic melancholy.

© 2012 Luke Howard

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SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

Born Senyonovo, Russia, April 1, 1873; died Beverly Hills, March 28, 1943
Sonata No. 2, Op. 36 
Composed in 1913, revised in 1931; 20 minutes

Rachmaninoff started composing his Piano Sonata No. 2 in 1913, while taking a break in Rome from his rigorous concert schedule. It was a busy year for Rachmaninoff: he was simultaneously working on his choral symphony The Bells, and there was still much work to be done on the sonata after he returned to Russia in the summer. He continued revising the work later in 1913, and then again (more extensively) in 1931, when he was concerned that his finger technique was not as supple and agile as it had once been. He wrote at the time, “I look at my early works and see how much there is that is superfluous. Even in this sonata, so many voices are moving simultaneously, and it is too long.” Another final revision, on the advice and under the direction of his friend Vladimir Horowitz, came in 1942.

Similar in structure and technique to his famous Piano Concerto No. 3 (1909), Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata was likewise not an immediate success, but eventually endeared itself to its public. The technical demands at least equaled anything else in the literature to that point, and while there are numerous pianists who are able to handle the technique, conquering the musical and aesthetic demands is another issue still. Rachmaninoff did not care for the piece himself—he found the sonata frustrating, while admitting that Horowitz played it better than he did.

Formally this work follows the classical pattern of piano sonata composition, with a sonata-allegro first movement, a lyrical and expressive slow movement and a dynamic, dramatic finale. The first movement (Allegro agitato) in B-flat minor opens with a cascading first subject that is soon transformed when the harmonies shift to the relative major, D-flat. A gentle second subject seems drawn from the same thematic well that produced the composer’s Op. 32 preludes—lyrical, elegant, and pianistic. The development section, simplified and radically truncated in the 1931 revision, includes evocations of chiming bells (something of a Rachmaninoff thumbprint) that leads into a final recapitulation.

After a transitional introduction, the meditative and improvisatory second movement (Lento) settles into the distant key of E minor for a lilting theme. As in the opening movement, the theme is then reimagined in the relative major (G major) and varied further. Allusions to the first movement appear, then another modulatory passage that leads back to B-flat for the finale.

After reprising the transitional introduction from the second movement, the finale (Allegro molto) presents a sizzling juxtaposition between furious virtuoso passagework and staccato cheerfulness before concluding optimistically.

© 2012 Luke Howard

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A musician of broad musical interests and curiosity, pianist Marc-André Hamelin is renowned in equal measure for his fresh readings of the established repertoire and for his exploration of lesser-known works of the 19th and 20th centuries. He began his 2012/13 season in September performing and recording Haydn concertos with Les Violons du Roy and Bernard Labadie on Hyperion Records. In November and December, he toured North America with the Takacs String Quartet, appearing on Lincoln Center’s “Great Performers” series and at Toronto, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and San Francisco. He then traveled to Europe, giving recitals in England, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and performing concertos by Rubinstein and Medtner with the National Philharmonic of Russia.

This month alone, he has performed with the Columbus Symphony and Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and given recitals in Detroit, Toronto and Baltimore. February finds him on a recital tour of the Quebec province, and giving performances with the New World Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas and Jessye Norman for its John Cage Festival.

In the remainder of the season, Mr. Hamelin will appear with the Atlanta Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada and the San Francisco Symphony. He also returns to Europe for a recital tour of Vienna, Moscow and Berlin. Among highlights of recent seasons, Mr. Hamelin opened the 2012 Aspen Music Festival and appeared at the 2011 BBC Proms in recital and with orchestra. That season also marked his Berlin Philharmonic debut and performances of the epic Busoni Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall and in Europe.

Mr. Hamelin records exclusively for Hyperion Records. His most recent release is a third double-disc set of Haydn sonatas.  His recent solo disc of works by Liszt was selected as Gramophone’s 2011 “Critic’s Choice.” In 2010, he received his ninth Grammy Award nomination for an album of his own compositions, Hamelin: Ètudes, and a first prize from the German Record Critics’ Association. His discography also includes concertos and solo works by composers ranging from Chopin, Haydn, Liszt and Schumann to Alkan, Busoni, Godowsky and Medtner.

A resident of Boston, Marc-André Hamelin is the recipient of a lifetime achievement prize by the German Record Critics’ Association. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Québec and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. His website is marcandrehamelin.com

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