NY Times, March 24, 2002

MUSIC; A Virtuoso Who Favors the Fringe

By JEREMY EICHLER

THE French-Canadian pianist Marc-Andr Hamelin is not easily frightened. At 40, he has
made a career of playing the seemingly unplayable. He can unleash maelstroms of sound with
astounding poise and precision. So his account of first laying eyes on the tude No. 1 by
Nikolai Roslavets sticks in the ear: ''It was one of the few times that I have ever looked at
printed music and been genuinely scared.''
The fear is understandable. Roslavets, an obscure early-20th-century Ukrainian composer,
invented his own harmonic system, based on altered scales. The mesmerizing tude Mr.
Hamelin mentions is studded with double sharps and double flats, sprawling illegibly over as
many as four staffs at once. To learn the piece, Mr. Hamelin had to renotate the entire work
painstakingly, and it still remained a knuckle-buster. Listeners can hear for themselves at Mr.
Hamelin's recital on Tuesday at the Miller Theater.
The obvious question is, why go through that effort for a composer as obsolete as Roslavets?
The answer requires entering Mr. Hamelin's fascinating musical universe, where forgotten
tributaries of the piano literature become central avenues for exploration, and where names
like Beethoven and Mozart are often edged out by shadowy figures from the margins of
history, like Godowsky, Alkan, Medtner, Henselt, Catoire and Kapustin.
Indeed, Mr. Hamelin has positioned himself as a maverick champion of music that has been
unfairly overlooked. He has campaigned for these composers in recitals and particularly in his
prolific recordings for Hyperion, which gives him almost free rein to record whatever he
wishes. To dip into his discography of some 40 recordings, including previous work on other
labels, is to encounter flashes of the strange and the beautiful.
''I wouldn't expect all performers to be as curious as I am,'' he said recently at his home here,
''but it's very important to consider that if one wants to make a recital career, one doesn't have
to depend on Beethoven's 'Appassionata' or Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition.' There
are other things around worthy of consideration.''
That is an understatement, as suggested by Mr. Hamelin's vast collection of sheet music,
partly inherited from a Montreal pianist who had been a disciple of Scriabin's.
One might imagine a cabalistic mystique to accompany his passion for the obscure. Instead,
Mr. Hamelin projects a casual, vaguely mischievous air, with large owlish glasses and a
quick, piercing laugh. Showing off his musical stacks, which line the entrance corridor to his
home, he calls to mind less a brooding professor or a Romantic titan than a bookish child at
play in a museum after hours.
Yet there is nothing childish about his musicianship. His technique is the stuff of insider
legend. Alex Ross, the classical-music critic of The New Yorker, counts Mr. Hamelin's hands
''among the wonders of the musical world,'' and it is easy to see why. He plays with his upper

body almost motionless while his fingers rampage over the keyboard. He can dispatch
withering accompanimental figures while trumpeting out melodies with bewildering clarity,
spaciousness and control.
Of course, a reputation as a mere instrumental stuntman can be damning to any pianist. And
sure enough, while enjoying a steady following among pianophiles, Mr. Hamelin complains
that listeners and critics often get so caught up in technical wizardry that they stop listening to
the expressive depth of the music he is presenting. ''All people seem to see is the high-wire
act,'' he said. ''I couldn't care less about that myself. I am primarily concerned with being a
medium for composers' thoughts.''
The familiar song of the poor, misunderstood virtuoso? In Mr. Hamelin's case, one senses an
honesty underlying his words and informing his musical explorations. His interest in forgotten
composers, for example, extends far beyond mere novelty or shock value. His former teacher
Russell Sherman described Mr. Hamelin's approach as ''a beautiful mission, a beautiful
destiny.''
''Marc helps us remember all of those musical genies and lepers,'' Mr. Sherman added, ''while
making their music into such astonishing sonorities.''
Not all genies and lepers are of equal interest to Mr. Hamelin. He gravitates toward the late
19th and early 20th centuries, when tonality was coming unhinged and composers were
discovering distant worlds of sound. Ives and Scriabin are primal texts for Mr. Hamelin, but
he has searched far and wide for what he calls ''sudden, unexplainable flights of imagination.''
''When I analyze certain things, I try to put myself in the skin of the composer,'' he said. ''But
there are those magical moments where I absolutely cannot figure out how on earth the
composer could have come up with this idea. When I really encounter genuine inspiration, it
seems to come out of nowhere, and that is tremendously thrilling.''
The thrill of discovery began early for Mr. Hamelin. He grew up in Montreal, and his father
was an amateur pianist with a sizable collection of sheet music. At 13, he discovered Ives's
ruggedly iconoclastic ''Concord'' Sonata, and new harmonic vistas kept unfolding. He also
composed, and he continues to do so. He has recorded a series of his own fiendishly difficult
tudes, witty commentaries on composers like Liszt, Paganini and Scarlatti. (These
achievements have earned him a prominent place in a book, ''The Composer-Pianists:
Hamelin and the Eight,'' soon to be published by Amadeus Press.)
At the Vincent d'Indy School of Music in Montreal his inquisitiveness was not always
encouraged. His teachers did not approve when they spotted a copy of Pierre Boulez's
explosive Second Sonata; they feared that he was neglecting his assigned works. ''In a way I
suppose it's true,'' he said, ''because when you discover something like the Boulez sonata at
age 17 or 18, you are really consumed by it.''
He was given greater scope at Temple University, where he earned bachelor's and master's
degrees. Public validation and a big career boost came in 1985 at the Carnegie Hall
Competition, where he won first prize and a Carnegie recital debut.
His subsequent career has been curious. His recordings are consistently among Hyperion's top
sellers, an impressive feat in view of what he records, and he can fill leading halls in Europe,
Japan and Canada. But a broader visibility has eluded him in the United States. Performance

opportunities can be scarce even in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, Jody
Applebaum, a singer and his occasional cabaret partner. ''I would like to play in Carnegie
once again before I die,'' he said with palpable frustration.
Mr. Hamelin points to poor American management in the past. But you have to wonder about
the implications of his chosen repertory, which, if presented without his reputation behind it,
would empty halls faster than you can say Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. A key to his overall
success has been his accumulation of listeners' trust in his taste, but that takes years to build.
He has learned the hard way that his programs must always balance the unusual with heavy
doses of the more traditional. ''Listeners have a limit,'' he said.
His recital this week will push that limit, even by Mr. Hamelin's standards. As part of the
Miller Theater's ''Hidden Russian Avant-Garde'' series, he will perform Scriabin's Sixth and
Seventh Sonatas, music of a lush, opiated grandeur, which Mr. Hamelin has recorded with a
luminous tone and a wonderful pliancy of line. The notorious Roslavets tudes pick up where
those sonatas leave off in their wayward harmonic language.
In the second half, Mr. Hamelin will present several works by Leo Ornstein, the radical
futurist composer and pianist who died last month at 108 or 109. (His date of birth is
disputed.) The program, which was already in place before Ornstein's death, will include his
''Danse Sauvage'' from 1913, music of bracing tone clusters and barely controlled sonic
violence, and the Sonata No. 8, which Ornstein wrote in 1990 when he was almost 100.
Mr. Hamelin has a clear affinity for Ornstein's music, which he calls vastly underappreciated.
He has recorded some Ornstein for release this year, and he has dedicated this recital to the
composer's memory.
In a way, Ornstein, who was born in czarist Russia, studied with Glazunov and knew Busoni,
was the last living link to two worlds Mr. Hamelin greatly values: the 19th-century composerpianist tradition and the freewheeling experimentalism of the 1910's and 20's. It is hard to
think of a contemporary pianist better suited in technique or musical imagination to
commemorate the passing of Ornstein's extraordinary life into the history he helped forge.
For Mr. Hamelin, this is also an opportunity to agitate for more music he believes in. ''I guess
it's a little pretentious to expect to change the course of musical appreciation,'' he said. ''I don't
think I could do that. But at the very least, I would be very happy if, in the time I have left, I
could make a dent.''