Marc-André Hamelin (photograph by Sim Connety-Clarke, courtesy of SFP)
Last night pianist Marc-André Hamelin returned to Herbst Theatre to contribute to the 45th Season Favorites series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). This was his fifteenth visit to SFP. Hamelin has a prodigious command of just about every keyboard style at the piano, and the diversity of those styles was both evident and engaging in the program he prepared. The first half juxtaposed Joseph Haydn with three twentieth-century composers (one of whom is still alive). The second half was also twentieth-century, this time featuring two Russian composers whose births were separated by less than a decade. The earlier of these was Sergei Rachmaninoff, born in 1873; and he was preceded in the program by Nikolai Medtner, who was born in 1880.
Hamelin consistently takes the stage with an engaging personality. However, when he sits down at the keyboard, he is intensely focused on his work. Nevertheless, he opened his program with two composers with reputations for their prankish personalities. He began with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XVI/37 sonata in D major, the third of the five Opus 30 compositions. Haydn was known for his engaging approach to expressiveness, and it would be fair to say that Hamelin’s account caught that expressive spirit. However, he also adapted it to his instrument, taking the liberty of a wider dynamic range than any of Haydn’s keyboards could have afforded.
Most importantly, however, Hamelin was not shy in expressing Haydn’s prankishness, making his interpretation a perfect complement to the following offering, Frank Zappa’s “Ruth is Sleeping.” The title referred to Ruth Underwood, the percussionist for The Mothers of Invention from 1968 until 1977. However, that title was even more specific than naming one of Zappa’s “partners in crime.” Apparently, during a long rehearsal that would involve other members of Zappa’s band, she would “curl up underneath the marimba and go to sleep” (in Zappa’s words). My guess is that, if there is a Heaven, Zappa is up there having a good time sharing stories like these with Haydn!
Zappa was followed by the far more serious composer Stefan Wolpe with a performance of the “Passacaglia” movement from his Opus 23, Four Studies on Basic Rows. This music was inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s approach to treating all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale as equals, exploring different ways in which “rows” of all twelve of the tones could be permuted. I must confess that I could not, for the life of me, suss out what made this composition a passacaglia; and the performance, as a whole, reminded me more of Amadeus than of Schoenberg, with that “too many notes” phrase in the script! The first half of the program then concluded with John Oswald’s “Tip,” which amounted to a plethora of thematic quotations, which were presumably meant to be funny but, due to excessive length, came across as only tedious.
I welcomed the second half of the program because I have had little exposure to Medtner’s music. Hamelin selected two relatively short pieces played without interruption: a set of variations given the title “Improvisation” (Opus 31, Number 1 in B-flat minor) and “Danza festiva” (Opus 38, Number 3). However, Medtner had to give way to Rachmaninoff, represented primarily by his Opus 36 piano sonata in B-flat minor. Sadly, too much of this felt like Hamelin was just banging away at the notes, which had also been his approach to the “warm-up” for the sonata, the E-flat minor “Étude-tableau,” the fifth piece in the Opus 39 collection. Taken has a whole, his performance of Rachmaninoff’s music came off more like an Olympic event than a piano recital.
That disposition continued in Hamelin’s second encore with a particularly aggressive (but unidentified) selection by Sergei Prokofiev. The first encore, on the other hand, was more engaging. “Music Box” was a short piece that Hamelin had composed during his school days. As far as I am concerned, it definitely benefited from an opportunity to see the light again!
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