Newsday, August 2005

MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN, piano. Attended Saturday at the International Keyboard Institute & Festival (IKIF), 185 West 85th Street in Manhattan. For information, visit www.ikif.org or call 212-580-0210 ext. 4858.

Don't say we didn't warn you. In Newsday's preview of New York City music festivals, review of Marc-André Hamelin’s New York Philharmonic debut and coverage of the opening concerts at the International Keyboard Institute & Festival (IKIF), we tipped you off that the Montréal-born pianist's recital might turn out to be a highlight of the summer music season.

Such predictions often result in mortification for those making them. But in this case, Hamelin came through with a concert that exceeded expectations and testified to his wide range of musical sympathies.

Hamelin is best known as a virtuosic interpreter of the keyboard's most flashy works, from the blistering sonatas of Alexander Scriabin to the dance-infused tone-pictures of "Iberia" by Isaac Albéniz. But his IKIF recital opened with Schubert's inward Sonata in A, D. 664, whose placid initial theme sounded with bell-like clarity against a backdrop of velvety darkness. Schubert restates the second movement’s urgent theme several times and finally breaks it down into desolate notes, chords and flourishes. As played by Hamelin, these mournful musical fragments drifted away like autumn leaves on a silent wind.

A selection of Leopold Godowsky's Studies after Chopin's Études showed off Hamelin's technical prowess. Like a familiar scene viewed through a prism, these works invite a certain cognitive vertigo: Where does original end and embellishment begin? The IKIF audience broke into giddy titters after one roiling, coruscating, brilliantly played piece.

Hamelin devoted the program's second half to opera paraphrases by Franz Liszt. Verdi and Wagner are thought of as artistic antagonists, but the two shared a veneration for Bellini's Norma, an opera universally admired for the poignant eloquence of its word-settings and melodies.

Interestingly, in his "Reminiscences de Norma," Liszt omits those portions of the opera most celebrated today—the moonlit aria "Casta diva," for example—and focuses instead on its warlike opening and grandiose finale. The fanfare that heralds Norma's entrance here melts into her final, desperate pleas before mounting the funeral pyre, the opera becoming a nightmarish vortex of tears and blood.

Hamelin brought out all the heated melancholy of Liszt's vision, nowhere more than in the thunderous chords of the finale, as dark and gaudy as the flames that consume the errant priestess. Before the Norma paraphrase, he played works based on operas in which Bellini's influence is writ large: "Isoldens Liebestod," a piercingly sensitive transcription of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde finale; and the "Paraphrase de Concert" of Verdi's Ernani.

Beneath the cascades of jewel-like notes of Liszt's Verdi paraphrase, Hamelin found a hint of the painful sacrifice that Don Carlo makes to become worthy of his ancestor Charlemagne. Similarly, his trills and arpeggios in Isolde's love-death took on a ghostly, disembodied quality, with the repeated notes and peaceful chord at the work's conclusion suggesting echoes of a febrile heartbeat sinking away into blissful nothingness.