by Angela Sutton
Photo credit: Fran Kaufman
Marc Andre-Hamelin and his disciplined fingers came to 92nd Street Y on Wednesday night for a big program featuring music of the 20th century's opening decades. Mr. Hamelin has made a career performing highly polished versions of technically challenging pieces, and this program was a prime example.
Unlike Horowitz's willful stoicism or Lang Lang's cavorting, however, Mr. Hamelin's approach to the keyboard is no fuss and undramatic—coolly intellectual, in spite of all the notes. Although sometimes disconcerting, this attitude allows the fireworks to speak for themselves as musical texture, rather than serving as a vehicle for the performer's ego.
Wednesday's program opened with a thunderous reading, in transcription, of Bach's G minor Organ Fantasia and Fugue. Busoni's Sonatina Seconda, a bleak and strange work of dark impressionism, followed before the first half closed with a group of Debussy works—Images Book I and L'Isle Joyeuse. The standout here, for me, was the "Mouvement" from Images, which Mr. Hamelin rendered with glittering rhythmic drive.
Mr. Hamelin started the second half, however, with levity, in his own Variations on a Theme of Paganini, a gumbo of famous piano music that the madcap Earl Wild could have cooked up. His encores were equally lighthearted: a romanticized reading of Mozart's "easy" C Major Piano Sonata, and a marvelously cracked version of Chopin's "Minute" waltz that went straight off the rails in its second half.
Why not have a good laugh at a recital? And who would have thought that when Hamelin, the technician's technician, revealed his musical personality, it would resemble Chuck Jones?
