Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the Great Performers Series, presented by the San Francisco Symphony, hosted a solo recital by French-Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin. Hamelin is no stranger to San Francisco. He has an astonishing knack for mastering some of the most complex compositions in the solo piano repertoire, and he usually manages to balance his technical fireworks with an insightful rhetorical stance. Last night, however, he never seemed to get beyond leaping the technical hurdles, resulting in an overall impression of a performance that was dazzling in technique but disappointingly bloodless in expression.
The album that inspired one of Hamelin’s selections (from a Muse Press Web page)
Hamelin clearly has a sincere sense of adventure. On this program it involved an extended-play 45-RPM album from the Fifties entitled Mr. Nobody Plays Trenet. Trenet was Charles Trenet, a French singer and songwriter with a successful career that began in the Thirties and continued through the Nineties. He is best known for “La Mer,” which was given a best-selling English version by Bobby Darin called “Beyond the Sea.” (The tune would later find its way into Finding Nemo.)
Hamelin was so moved by the wildly virtuoso accounts of Trenet’s popular songs that he wrote his own transcriptions of the six songs on the album. Many years later he learned that “Mr. Nobody” was the pianist Alexis Weissenberg, who presumably had kept himself anonymous so as not to damage his reputation as a classical pianist. Weissenberg’s youngest daughter, Maria, would eventually send Hamelin Weissenberg’s own manuscripts of four of the songs. Those did not always follow the recordings, suggesting that the album itself was the result of improvisatory sessions. Last November Muse Press published all six of the song arrangements as edited by Hamelin, presumably based on both the recording and Weissenberg’s own documents. He also recorded the pieces for his Hyperion album In a State of Jazz.
Jazz has clearly become more acceptable in the concert hall since the days when Weissenberg had to hide behind the name of Mr. Nobody. Indeed, pianists such as Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Yuja Wang have had no problem drawing upon past jazz masters such as Art Tatum and Bill Evans for encore selections. For my money, however, the “leader of the pack” is still the late Earl Wild, who published Virtuoso Etudes After Gershwin, seven piano études that hold their own again Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, each based on one of the songs by George Gershwin. (The attentive listener will find Liszt’s “Un sospiro” lurking in the “Embraceable You” étude.)
The Weissenberg-Hamelin versions, on the other hand, are totally lacking in the pop spirit behind the music. Each of the arrangements involves prodigious virtuosity, but it is virtuosity with no purpose other than the virtuosity itself. When we listen to Wild, we can attend to both Liszt and Gershwin in equal measure, admiring the technical demands without giving up the fun of digging a new take on an old Gershwin tune. Hamelin’s performance last night never left any room for the spirit behind any of Trenet’s tunes, making for a listening experience that was little more than hollow.
The same could be said of the other unfamiliar offering on the program, an early tone poem for solo piano by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, his Opus 17 “Cipressi” (cypresses). While his thematic vocabulary was somewhat limited, the composer certainly knew how to apply it to both denotation and connotation of cypress trees. In Hamelin’s hands, however, the rhetoric of a tone poem was distilled down to a purely technical study. Granted, that technical stance provided a point of view of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s work that few have encountered; and, for me at least, the journey of discovery was worth taking. Nevertheless, it was hard to avoid thinking that the composer’s own capacity for expressiveness had been short-changed.
The major bulk of the program was devoted to those two major icons born in the year 1810, Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann. Most listeners were probably on more familiar ground with Chopin’s Opus 61 “Polonaise-Fantaisie” in A-flat major and Opus 54 scherzo in E major and Schumann’s Opus 17 fantasia in C major. Sadly, Hamelin’s executions of these pieces were all about technical details, and the Schumann selection tended to suffer the most. From a rhetorical point of view, Opus 17 is clearly the product of an erratic mind; but Hamelin did not want to venture into that territory, preferring, instead, to “stick to the book.”
Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangement of the Chaconne movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s D minor solo violin partita (BWV 1004) also suffered from a by-the-book reading. There is no question that the rhetoric behind Busoni’s arrangement is way over the top, and Hamelin was clearly determined to get beyond those excesses. However, he achieved his goal by virtually eliminating all of them, leaving the lister with little to do other than sort out the Busoni notes from the Bach ones.
Ultimately, this was an evening concerned with conquering major technical demands in the absence of any other contributing factors. That sense of personal priority found its way into Hamelin’s first encore, a toccata on one of the earliest documented secular songs from the Middle Ages, “L’homme armé” (the armed man). Hamelin wrote this to be played by those who had made the cut for the Cliburn Competition, and the technical demands were definitely impressive. However, once again, there was little more to the music than its imposing virtuosity. Fortunately, this was followed by a more explicitly expressive encore selection, “Herberge” (wayside inn) from Schumann’s Opus 82 collection Waldszenen (forest scenes). Still, it was a long wait for this one effective nod to taking a rhetorical stance.
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