Hamelin’s Beethoven++ Recital for SFP

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin (from the SFP event page for this performance)

Last night in Herbst Theatre pianist Marc-André Hamelin made his fourteenth appearance with San Francisco Performances (SFP), having made his SFP debut in December of 2003. He presented a program imaginatively structured around two sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven from the opposite ends of that composer’s career. The program concluded with Opus 106 (“Hammerklavier”) in B-flat major, the “late” sonata best known for the mind-boggling fugue composed for the final movement. At the other end of the program Hamelin played the third of the Opus 2 sonatas in C major, part of Beethoven’s first publication of solo piano music. This was preceded by the Wq 59/4 rondo in C minor by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and followed by the world premiere performance of a composition by Hamelin, “Nowhere Fast.”

Opus 106 was clearly the “heaviest” offering on the program; and Hamelin judiciously prepared all of the preceding selections with a much “lighter” rhetorical stance. Regular readers probably know by now that I have an aversion to those hooked on the “scowling Beethoven” style, since they seem to deliberately overlook a sense of humor that pervaded the composer’s career from beginning to end. There is no shortage of that humor in any of the Opus 2 sonatas, and I was more than a little curious as to how Hamelin would handle the rhetorical stance of this music. When he gave his Great Performers Series recital in Davies Symphony Hall in March of 2019, I went as far as to accuse him as bloodless in his expressiveness.

Fortunately, his approach to Opus 2 was anything but bloodless. He seemed to have picked up on every prankish gesture that Beethoven had planted in his score, allowing the jokes to unfold at a brisk pace without overplaying any one of them. Furthermore, his Bach selection was the perfect “warm-up,” with its own wildly playful stop-and-go rhetoric. Both of these selections then prepared the listener for experiencing Hamelin’s own efforts as a composer.

“Nowhere Fast” was scored for piano quintet; and Hamelin played with the Alexander String Quartet of violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violist David Samuel, and cellist Sandy Wilson. For those reading the program notes, the pranks began even before the music. Hamelin decided to write his own program notes, which read, in their entirety, as follows:

Curiously, the piece is its own program note. Anything I could say about it would give everything away, and I certainly don’t want that!

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I do not have to worry about giving anything away. “Nowhere Fast” is clearly a reflection on the technique that Philip Glass prefers to call “repetitive structures” (rather than “minimalism”). All four members of the quartet have parts that are seeded with repeated “cells,” while the piano part tends to comment from a distance. As the piece progresses, the commentary becomes more extensive, gradually growing into an annoyance with all that repetition. Hamelin was clearly anything but bloodless in conceiving this composition, and his contribution to the performance was about as over-the-top as I have ever seen him get!

Following a brief (and well-timed) pause, Hamelin returned to get down to the business of Opus 106. Here again I must eat my words about bloodlessness. The technical demands made by this music could not be more imposing, but Hamelin always knew how to take an appropriate rhetorical stance as he dealt with each of those demands. That includes taking on the imposing durations of the two latter movements, the Adagio sostenuto and the extensive fugue with its prolonged introduction. Nevertheless, Hamelin guided the attentive listener through the full extent of this music’s structural scope, balancing technique and expressiveness with the skill of a tightrope walker.

Having completed such an imposing journey, Hamelin then led the audience back to where he had begun. HIs encore was another short Bach composition the Wq 117/28 “La complaisante” (the complacent one), structured as a minuet. The tempo marking for this piece was Allegretto grazioso, and Hamelin’s execution could not have been more graceful.