December 16, 2009: Marc-André Hamelin presents the delights of the nineteenth century

In his program for San Francisco Performances last night at Herbst Theatre, pianist Marc-André Hamelin communicated an understanding of the nineteenth-century aesthetic that is regrettably rare in the current crop of concert offerings.  It is an understanding that subordinates the performer to the music itself and the demands made by that music on appropriate performance technique.  His casual appearance and cool disposition make it clear that the program is not about him;  it is about the nineteenth-century perspective on both composition and performance.

This perspective is best appreciated if we again invoke the concepts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric behind the medieval trivium.  It is through grammar that we understand how a composition is structured, not only as an assembly of building blocks but also as a prioritization of that assembly through which some blocks serve to embellish others (as adjectives are used to embellish nouns).  As with sentences, musical compositions may be ambiguous about structure, in which case it is up to the performer to clarify how (s)he wishes to communicate that structure.  Clarification often comes through identifying a logic behind the structure, which may be facilitated by regarding the performance as a journey through time for which there are clear points of departure and arrival and a well-defined path connecting the two.  Put in more blunt terms, logic concerns the question of what, in the composition, the performer expects us to listen to in order to justify the commitment of sitting there for the duration of the performance.  Having established that justification, one then applies rhetoric to keep the listener engaged in that commitment to listen.

The application of this framework to Hamelin's performance may best be appreciated in the major work on his program, the collection of four consecutive etudes from Charles-Valentin Alkan's Opus 39 collection that he chose to call a "symphony" for solo piano.  The tempo markings make it clear that these four etudes are assembled in the structural plan of a four-movement symphony:

1. The Allegro moderato follows the conventions of an opening symphonic movement.
2. The Andantino is marked Marche funèbre in a clear nod to Ludwig van Beethoven's use of a funeral march as a movement in both a piano sonata and a symphony.
3. The Menuet indicates a basic ternary form movement, which is probably more in the spirit of a scherzo.
4. The Presto is also marked as Finale, following the convention of a fast-paced conclusion.

The listening experience is thus very much a symphonic journey along which one encounters many features that had established themselves in the eighteenth century.  Rhetorically, however, the sense of etude is invoked from beginning to end in the virtuoso demands that must be met in the interest of proper execution.  This is where flamboyance comes into play;  and, by keeping his own cool, Hamelin allows those on the audience side to appreciate that the general journey is very much about taking a traditional structure (probably dismissed as outmoded by many of Alkan's contemporaries) and illuminating it with fireworks, rather like a low-tech version of one of those hokey Son et Lumière productions that were so popular as tourist attractions in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Hamelin's appreciation of this nineteenth-century aesthetic is so acute that he can also apply it equally effectively to eighteenth-century music.  This was most apparent in his performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's A minor sonata K. 310.  Composed in 1777 when Mozart was 21, this is a highly turbulent and expressive work that goes beyond the exuberant displays of a "show-off kid."  Mozart scholar Maynard Solomon has even seen it as a foreshadowing of the entire framework of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that would define nineteenth-century composition;  so, in many respects, all Hamelin was doing in his (decidedly non-period) approach was allowing the music to cast its shadow forward to the nineteenth century in the manner of Solomon's assessment.  In other words the performance had less to do with any sense of Mozart's own grammar, logic, and rhetoric and more to do with how the nineteenth century received Mozart's legacy.

The set of F minor variations on an Andante theme by Joseph Haydn, Hoboken XVII/6, is another matter.  Haydn was always trying to invent ways to push the envelope of composition;  but he also had the good sense to pay attention when his patron, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, would let him know (usually gently) than enough was enough.  With Esterházy's death in 1790, however, those constraints were lifted;  and Haydn was once again free to explore new ways to invent.  This particular work, composed in 1793, actually has the subtitle "Sonata – Un Piccolo Divertimento," which is a bit deceptive, considering that it is a single movement (making it "piccolo").  Its double variation form, which would figure so significantly in the fifth and ninth symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven and much later in the fourth symphony of Gustav Mahler, was a radical departure from what variations were expected to be, matched only by the outrageous turn-on-a-dime progressions in a coda that, when used at all, had previously been intended to return the listener to the simplicity of the theme after a journey of embellishments.  This music is less a foreshadowing of nineteenth-century thinking as much as it is one of the first clear and explicit statements of that thinking, making it the perfect way for Hamelin to introduce his program.

All this attention to the Haydn and Mozart offerings that began Hamelin's program and the Alkan that concluded it should not detract from the middle of his own journey (or, for that matter, his encore).  Between Mozart and Alkan we had Franz Liszt, the Venezia e Napoli supplement to the second "year" of his Années de Pèlerinage, and Gabriel Fauré's sixth D-flat major nocturne (Opus 63).  In these cases Hamelin was again the quiet center of control, whether it was the roiling energy of Liszt at his most "Lisztich" (not necessarily in the pejorative sense that Johannes Brahms had intended) or Fauré's intricate interleaving of voices, which only makes sense through a clear rendering of the interplay.  The performance was all about the music, and the performer was simply the channel for that performance.  This was also true of his encore, the second of the Opus 27 nocturnes of Frédéric Chopin (also in D-flat major), whose ternary form frames some of Chopin's most elaborate embellishments between outer sections of deceptive simplicity.

On a broader scale San Francisco Performances has used the past two weeks to offer us an impressive piano journey of its own.  First we had Marino Formenti guide us through many of the complexities of the twentieth-century aesthetic, after which he led us just as capably into the twenty-first-century aesthetic of Bernhard Lang.  Then, last night we could fall back into the nineteenth-century with a more informed sense of what it was, where it came from, and where it would eventually lead.  If this program planning was less a matter of design and more one of happy circumstance, we should still celebrate the benefits of that circumstance!