Russian Music in Marc-André Hamelin’s Performing Practice (Part 1)

Canadian pianist and composer Marc-André Hamelin (b. 1961) is an expert in Russian music. His repertoire includes all the piano sonatas by Alexander Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner and Samuil Feinberg, the piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Dmitry Shostakovich and Rodion Shchedrin. He pertains to the small number of pianists who promote the music of the Russian avant-garde and rarely performed composers (Georgy Catoire, Nikolai Roslavets). In this article, attention is focused on Hamelin’s interpretation of works by Russian composers of the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries — Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Medtner. A central place in the pianist’s repertoire is held by the music of Medtner, whose compositions induce Hamelin to contemplate. The performer is attracted, first of all, to the detailed quality of Medtner’s piano texture. In Scriabin’s sonatas, Hamelin experiments with sound, disclosing the contrasting boundaries of the composer’s musical world — intellectual perfection and the “outbursts” of emotions. In Rachmaninoff’s music, he accentuates attention on the diversity of the timbral colors of the piano, the palette of strokes and dynamic shadings, disclosing before the listeners the pianistic qualities of the composer’s thought. Special attention in the article is given to the placing of the fingerings in Rachmaninoff’s works carried out by Hamelin upon commission of the German publishing house G. Henle Verlag. It is noted that the pianist’s decisions of fingering are stipulated by various performing goals: the necessity to accentuate attention on the melodic lines, to achieve a conciseness of articulation, to even out a line in a passage in terms of its sound.