An Evening of Excess with Marc-André Hamelin

Marc-André Hamelin (photograph by Sim Cannety-Clarke, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

French-Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin is no stranger to San Francisco. He was one of the recitalists to contribute to the 45th Season Favorites series presented by San Francisco Performances this past February. Last night he returned to Davies Symphony Hall to give his first Great Performers Series recital since March of 2019.

As I observed at the beginning of this season, Hamelin “does not shy away from ambitious undertakings.” Putting aside any need to “warm up” the audience, he launched last night’s recital immediately with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 106 piano sonata in B-flat major, known best by the title “Hammerklavier.” As might be guessed, this was the entire first half of the program. Things calmed down after the intermission with a straightforward account of the calmer rhetoric encountered in Robert Schumann’s Opus 82 suite, Waldszenen. Then it was “back to the races” with a “no holds barred” approach to the finger-busting demands of Maurice Ravel’s suite Gaspard de la nuit.

One would have thought that, after so much sound and fury, enough was enough. However, Hamelin returned to present five encores. The first of these was the C-sharp minor étude, the first of the three pieces collected in Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 2 set of three pieces. This was followed by Hamelin’s own composition “Music Box” and a jazzy tune given no introduction. He then (I think) moved on to one of the Claude Debussy preludes, leading up to the final encore, which I could document only as “something with a lot of notes!”

Hamelin’s performances tend to be like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never know what you are going to get! I suppose he chose to begin with Beethoven’s Opus 106 because he wanted listeners to approach it with fresh minds, rather than echoes of other pieces of music. However, selecting Ravel for the other “bookend” almost seemed like a you-ain’t-heard-nuthin-yet gesture. A Hamelin program always seems to come across as promising a hearty meal … until the listener has to deal with digesting it!