| 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.
Read full review... | |
| 16-May-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Rhythm in heels: Yuja Wang at Carnegie Hall |
 Yuja Wang is all about rhythm. It would be easy to write about how her playing doesn’t have the profundity or architectural sense of more mature artists, but that would be to miss her considerable achievements – and with a young artist, it’s what’s achieved that should count. Jaw-dropping technical skill is unexceptional among pianists of Wang’s age, especially others in the first rank like Benjamin Grosvenor, Daniil Trifonov, and Khatia Buniatishvili.Read full review... | |
| 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.
Read full review... | |
