Marc-André Hamelin’s latest album featured on the new york times

He’s done it again. Marc-André Hamelin, one of the supreme piano virtuosos of our time, has landed on the New York Times’ highly selective “5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now” monthly feature, for the second time this year. This time, though, it’s for Hamelin’s first recording of music by Beethoven. He recorded the mighty Hammerklavier sonata, a 45-minute behemoth that is one of the true pinnacles of the repertoire. The album was released on October 4, on Hyperion Records, and is paired with an early Beethoven sonata — Op 2 No 3, in C major.

The transcendental difficulties of the Hammerklavier — by far Beethoven’s longest piano sonata, and in his view also his finest, and the only sonata for which he supplied metronome marks — will always deter all but the greatest pianists of the day, with only a select few able to master its formidable musical, emotional and technical challenges.

“Hamelin marshals his considerable skills for a reading of the “Hammerklavier” that clarifies and illuminates rather than simply overpowers,” writes the critic David Weininger.

Key to this achievement are a lighter touch and precise articulation that put some spring into Beethoven’s dense chords in the opening movement. If Hamelin misses the edgy satire in the Scherzo, his way with the great Adagio seems near-perfect, mesmerizing but always with a quiet sense of forward motion. As for the legendarily taxing fugue in the finale, once thought to be unplayable, he makes it sound improbably pianistic.

See the full piece HERE.