| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 19-May-2013 Chicago Symphony Center | Hamelin, the technician, at Chicago Symphony Center |
 Anyone who knows the name Marc-André Hamelin will know him foremost for his technique. It is, to use a crude expression, what his brand is built upon. He is known to be able to handily dispatch the most taxing pieces in both the modern repertoire and the warhorse cabinet, the latter of which furnished much of his recent program at Symphony Center in Chicago – Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit and Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata, for a start. Yet the fact of his technique obscures its place – in fact, its obscuring place – in his musicianship.
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| 22-Jan-2013 St Lawrence Centre For The Arts: Jane Mallett Theatre | Marc-André Hamelin makes his mark as composer-pianist in Toronto |
 The virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin played a program of works by Bach, Fauré, Ravel and Rachmaninov, bracketed by his own Variations on a theme by Paganini. Last March in Toronto, when Hamelin snuck this piece into the program as an encore, I wrote that it was “ten minutes of the most fun you’ll ever have crowding around a piano at the end of party.” Now that the Variations are in the program, and Hyperion has recently issued Hamelin’s 12 Études in all the minor keys, we might as well begin identifying Hamelin as a “pianist-composer” in the same league as Rachmaninov.
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| 5-Oct-2012 Holywell Music Room | Dark fantasies at the Oxford Chamber Music Festival |
 An introductory reading by local writer Philip Pullman was an appropriate introduction to the “Dusk to Dawn” concert, one of the last in this year’s Oxford Chamber Music Festival (themed “Fairytales and Fantasy”). The collision of a light-hearted surface with darker undertones was not just in Pullman’s retelling of the Grimm stories, but pervaded Artistic Director Priya Mitchell’s programming. An eclectic combination ranging from Beethoven to Tabakova, the evening featured a cluster of talented performers from across Europe.Read full review... | |
| 25-Jan-2012 West Road Concert Hall | Benjamin Grosvenor dazzles in Cambridge |
 Sussie Ahlburg.jpg) The word 'prodigy' is unavoidable when writing about Benjamin Grosvenor, or so it appears for the headline writers. Having eschewed many big concert dates and growing as an artist in smaller halls, he is clearly setting himself up for the long haul. This ambitious, sold-out Cambridge concert showed both how brilliant a pianist he already is, and hinted at how far he could go in the future.
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