Marc-André Hamelin, piano

In our mind’s eye, we often perceive composers as standing in relief to their historical contexts, rather than fully embedded members of their contemporary creative communities. This program highlights four renowned artists and their relationships to each other: Joseph Haydn as mentor to Ludwig van Beethoven, and Sergei Rachmaninoff as friend and champion of Nikolay Medtner. Through their works, we also get a bird’s eye view of the evolution and expansion of the piano sonata from its early establishment in the classical era to its sprawling mature form, as well as three shorter character pieces that communicate specific moods. 

By 1780, Joseph Haydn had worked for the Esterházy family for nearly 20 years, having established an enviable rapport with the remarkable collection of musicians in the orchestra he wrote for and led as part of his duties. The position granted Haydn the luxury of creative freedom afforded to him by their skills, and the opportunity to cross paths with many other talented individuals in Vienna. Among them were the sisters Katharina and Marianna Auenbrugger whose musical abilities were also recognized by Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus. The Piano Sonata in D Major, Hob. XVI:37 was one in a collection of six that Haydn wrote and dedicated to the Auenbruggers, noting to his publisher, “their way of playing, and their close attention to the music, are equal to those of the great masters. Both deserve to become known everywhere in Europe through the public newspapers.” Haydn had a particular gift for infusing his music with winking mischief and good humor, and we hear that in spades in the ebullient opening movement of the sonata that highlights the agility of the performer with rapid-fire scales zooming around the keyboard. The unusual slow movement is notable for its brevity, a small and regal jewel with a stately essence in sharp contrast to what came before and will come after, a sprightly Finale that concludes the work.  

Twelve years later, in 1792, as France convulsed in revolution, Haydn was making his way back to Vienna from London where he had spent an 18-month period as a visiting celebrity. Stopping in Bonn, he met a 21-year-old firebrand named Ludwig van Beethoven and agreed to take him as a composition student. By November, Beethoven had moved to Vienna, but tensions between master and student soon developed. Haydn’s teaching style and Beethoven’s independent streak clashed, and their formal time together ended the following year. Beethoven’s pupil, Ferdinand Ries, would later write, “Haydn desired that Beethoven should write on the title pages of his first works, ‘pupil of Haydn’s.’ Beethoven did not want to do so because, although as he said he had some lessons from Haydn, he had never learned anything from him.” Despite Beethoven’s acerbic recollection, he did feel gratitude for what mentorship he did gain from Haydn – things like a deeper understanding of musical proportion and professional advice. When it came time to publish the first mature set of three piano sonatas as his opus 2, he movingly dedicated them to Haydn. In the Sonata Op. 2, No. 3, we hear a characteristic that both Haydn and Beethoven shared, which was the eternal pursuit of innovation and a desire to push the boundaries of musical form and structure. Here, Beethoven penned a sonata of longer and broader scope than was typical at the time. It opens almost unassumingly with a quickly oscillating figure followed by silence, as if peeking around the stage curtain, before launching into an exploration of bravura pianism riffing inventively on the main themes introduced at the beginning. The slow movement follows, showcasing Beethoven’s ability to write beautifully moving melodies laden with raw emotion. In the third movement, Beethoven once again shows how much variation he can squeeze out of groupings of three notes and contrasts the detached texture of the outer sections with an inner Trio that transforms the three notes into flowing ribbons of sound. The work ends with a vivacious finale in rondo form where main and contrasting themes are alternated.  

Though Nikolay Medtner abandoned aspirations to become a concert pianist, the instrument was ever present in his life as a composer. He produced numerous large-scale works for the piano, such as the three concertos and 14 sonatas, in addition to a plethora of collected smaller atmospheric and character pieces. Among those were the Three Morceaux, Op. 31, and the Forgotten Melodies, Op. 38. The former was dedicated to the memory of a brilliant young composer, Alexei Stanchinsky, who had also studied at the Moscow Conservatory and died under tragic circumstances at the age of 26. Opening with a mournful melody accompanied by a gentle bassline, ebbing, and flowing with feeling, the Improvisation quickly leans into a series of brief variations on the opening theme. Though the notes are fully captured in the pages of the music and not spontaneously imagined like a true improvisation, the piece exudes an impulsive and breathtakingly virtuosic spirit of invention illustrative of the title. Similarly harnessing the fleeting, Medtner’s three cycles of Forgotten Melodies were constructed by using fragments of melodies that had been written down in notebooks and abandoned. The vibrant Danza Festiva is one of the most popular pieces in the cycle and may have been inspired by a Flemish painting depicting a festival. Distinctive features of this work are its commencing chords that may be evoking village bells or a dance band tuning – both of which are invitations to gather and dance, and the lively, sometimes syncopated, propelling rhythms.  

Unfortunately, despite his talents Medtner struggled to get consistent opportunities. However, he found encouragement and support in his friendship with Sergei Rachmaninoff, who used his own fame and influence to secure performance tours or give direct financial assistance to Medtner. Both shared a conviction to write music firmly rooted in traditional forms that maintained a connection to the post-Romantic world, shrugging off the influences of the modernist, experimental, and avant-garde works being written by their contemporaries. They would also both ultimately choose to flee revolutionary Russia, with Medtner settling in England and Rachmaninoff in the United States.  

Before the loss of his country, Rachmaninoff wrestled with personal loss, including the deaths of two individuals from his student days at the Moscow Conservatory, his teacher, Sergei Taneyev, and classmate, Alexander Scriabin, within two months of each other in 1915. The Etude-tableau (study pictures) Op. 39, No. 5 was written while preparing to give a memorial recital for the latter. It is an expression of wrought, raw, and restless feeling, and may have been inspired by Scriabin’s Poème Tragique. A work that straddles Rachmaninoff’s Russian and American periods is the Piano Sonata No. 2, which was premiered in its original version in 1913, but revised by the composer in 1931. Throughout his career, Rachmaninoff suffered from a persistent anxiety over audience reception of his works, even writing to Medtner that he monitored the amount of coughing in the hall to judge what they liked and disliked. Feeling that the original version was too dense, he significantly pruned what he thought were superfluous sections. Regardless of the changes, both versions maintain three distinctive characteristics pertaining to structure, disposition, and memory. First, the three movements, though distinct from each other, share recurring thematic material derived from the initial downward tumble at the head of the piece. In the slow movement, it appears as a jarring insertion, in the final movement it functions as a launching off point, creating an arc back to the opening. The sonata also shows us a slightly different side of Rachmaninoff. Here, the sweeping grandiosity heard in the Piano Concerto No. 3, written just six years earlier, is cast in a more intimate mood. A critic observed, “there is a certain inner reserve, severity and introspection.” Finally, the sonata is freighted with the sound of profound nostalgia. “All my life,” Rachmaninoff reminisced, “I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming and mournfully tolling bells.” Throughout the entirety of the sonata, chords evoking the sounds of various bells echo across its landscape, culminating in a resoundingly triumphant full peal.  

— Kathryn Bacasmot 

Kathryn Bacasmot is an independent writer about music. 

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin, a “performer of near-superhuman technical prowess” (The New York Times), is known worldwide for his unrivaled blend of consummate musicianship. He continues to amass praise for his brilliant technique in the great works of the repertoire, and for his intrepid exploration of the rarities of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries. He regularly performs around the globe with the leading orchestras and conductors of our time, and gives recitals at major concert venues and festivals worldwide.

Hamelin’s 2024-25 season begins with recitals in Asia at the Beijing Concert Hall, Xi’an Concert Hall, Seoul Arts Center, and in duo recitals with Charles Richard-Hamelin in Tokyo, Yokohama, and Fukuoka with later solo recitals in Gulangyu, Chengdu, and the Shanghai Symphony Hall. European highlights include recitals in Warsaw, Ascona, Copenhagen, Toulouse, Cremona, Florence, Budapest, Detmold, Nijmegen, Herrenhausen, Ruhr, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, and London’s Wigmore Hall. Orchestral appearances include the RTVE Madrid, Bruckner Orchester Linz, and Prague Radio Symphony. He will return to São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra for a recital and concerti touring with the orchestra later to the Bogotá International Classical Music Festival.

In North America he returns to Carnegie Hall for Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with Bernard Labadie.  Further orchestral appearances include the Cleveland Orchestra, Montreal Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, National Arts Center Orchestra in Ottawa and the orchestra of Quebec, Toledo, Amarillo, and a complete Beethoven Concerti Cycle with the Edmonton Symphony.  Recital highlights include Caramoor, San Francisco Performances, Music Toronto, Boston’s Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum, and the University of Georgia Presents. He also tours with the Dover Quartet in a program that features his own Piano Quintet.

Summer 2024 included recitals at the Schubertiade, Deutschlandsberg, Banff Center, Vivace Festival, a duo recital with Charles Richard-Hamelin at Ottawa Chamberfest, and Liszt Piano Concertos 1 and 2 with Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Orchestre Metropolitain at Festival de Lanaudiere and Domaine Forget.

An exclusive recording artist for Hyperion Records, Hamelin has released 89 albums to date, with notable recordings of a broad range of solo, orchestral, and chamber repertoire. In October, Hamelin releases his recording of Beethoven’s imposing Piano Sonata in B flat major, ‘Hammerklavier,’ Op. 106, coupled with the earlier Piano Sonata in C Major, Op. 2, No. 3. In 2025, he releases MixTape, featuring 20^th-century music.

Featuring nine original pieces, Hamelin’s 2024 album New Piano Works is a survey of some of his own recent works, exhibiting his formidable skill as a composer-pianist whose music imaginatively and virtuosically taps into his musical forebears. “His previous offerings of his own music were rich, but his latest self-portrait album is on another level,” wrote The New York Times, one of many outlets that wrote glowing reviews. It was Hamelin’s first album of all original compositions since Études (2010). In 2023, Hyperion released Hamelin’s recording of Fauré’s Nocturnes & Barcarolles, with the four-hand Dolly suite, played with his wife, Cathy Fuller. A double album of C.P.E. Bach’s Sonatas & Rondos was released in 2022, and another of William Bolcom’s Complete Rags. Both received wide critical acclaim and chart success.

Hamelin has composed music throughout his career, most of which is published by Edition Peters, including his Études and Toccata on L’homme armé, the latter commissioned by the Van Cliburn Foundation. Hamelin performed the Toccata along with music by C.P.E. Bach and Bolcom in an NPR Tiny Desk concert in 2023. His latest compositions include a piano quintet, which he premiered in 2022 with the Dover Quartet, and the solo piano works Hexensabbat and Mazurka, the latter commissioned by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the composer presented the first performance in spring 2024.

Hamelin makes his home in the Boston area with his wife, Cathy Fuller, a producer and host at Classical WCRB. Born in Montreal, he is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Record Critics’ Association, and over 20 of its quarterly awards. He has also received seven Juno Awards, 12 Grammy nominations, and the 2018 Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. In December 2020, he was awarded the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Keyboard Artistry from the Ontario Arts Foundation. Hamelin is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

marcandrehamelin.com