Manny Ax: Do you have a musical hero?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: The printed score.

[music]

Manny Ax: From WQXR and Carnegie Hall, this is Classical Music Happy Hour hosted by me, pianist Manny Ax. Each episode we'll speak with a special guest about their lives, listen to some of their favorite musical gems, play music-inspired games and answer questions from you, our listeners.

The New York Times has called today's guest a performer of near superhuman technical prowess. He's one of the world's premier pianists performing regularly with top orchestras around the world, as well as an avid and accomplished composer. If that wasn't enough, his discography includes over 70 albums. I am one of his many, many adoring fans, and it's a privilege for me to also call him a friend. Marc-Andre Hamelin welcome to the show.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: It's so good to be here, and thank you for inviting me here.

Manny Ax: When we met, we met backstage after one of your recitals at-

Marc-Andre Hamelin: In Philadelphia.

Manny Ax: -in Philadelphia. What I remember about that recital is that you played a fabulous encore of foray. You proceeded playing it by saying, "I just don't know why people don't play this piece more, because it's so lovely," and then you proceeded to play one of the most complicated things I've ever seen in my life. I came backstage and I said, "I can tell you exactly why. Not that many people play it."

Marc-Andre Hamelin: It wasn't high virtuosity. It was just florid and complex.

Manny Ax: Incredibly complex. You are, of course, one of the absolutely miraculous minds in piano playing. When I first encountered your playing, it was hearing an incredible collection of high virtuoso pieces, list opera transcriptions, I think, some of the Chopin’s Études Godowsky, I believe, but the kind of stuff that, basically, I always dreamt about playing and never actually would dare to attempt. What got you interested in that particular area?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I owe it to my dad, actually, because my dad was a little bit like me, although I really took it to extremes, and he was really looking left and right. He had an interest in not-so-standard repertoire. It was limited, but it was there. He was really inspired reading, in the 1960s sometime, Harold Schoenberg's book, The Great Pianists. It talked extensively about people like Alkan, especially Godowsky, and he was very intrigued by Godowsky. Unfortunately, most of the music was out of print by then, so he got what he could, and he got to amass, over time, a very enviable collection.

Manny Ax: You had music in the house, and this is what you practiced?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: No, I didn't practice at the time, but I remember, though that he would sit down at the piano and sight-read some of it.

Manny Ax: He must have been a formidable pianist.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: He was at a good level, actually. I remember sometime in the '60s, I think it was 1968, the publishers who had issued the Godowsky Chopin studies reprinted them. They hadn't been available for, I think, quite a few decades.

Manny Ax: Just for our listeners, the Godowsky versions of the Chopin studies are-- you have the original Chopin Études, and he made those look like child's play.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: Because a lot of the stuff that would be in the right hand then went to the left hand, he added strands of extra music to everything. It became fantasy on the Chopin Études shoots, in a way.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: In a way, I really regard them as variations on the originals.

Manny Ax: Unbelievably difficult.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Many of them are. Some of them are more reasonable.

[classical piano music]

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Others, especially some of the left-hand ones, you really scratch your head-

Manny Ax: If you have time.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: -and curse at them.

Manny Ax: You need both hands.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: You scratch your head with one hand.

[laughter]

Marc-Andre Hamelin: They came out again in five volumes, and my father heard about this, and of course, he was extremely excited and ordered a set. The day that the volumes arrived, I remember sitting with him, and looking at those-- I was already familiar in a visual sense, but also hearing them with the scores. We would just stare, and we just kept turning pages, and we were both absolutely bug eyed at these things. I have a correspondence from my dad as to when these arrived in the house. I was seven years old.

Manny Ax: Oh, my God. Really? That's where this kind of pattern started for you to learn this-

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes, essentially, but I was always very naturally curious. I remember also around the same time my dad subscribed to The Piano Quarterly, which then became Piano and Keyboard. It's no longer published, but it was old and very venerable magazine. They had at the front of the issue always, not only reviews of new sheet music, but they also reproduced, in miniature, the first pages.

It was everything from beginners music to very advanced contemporary stuff. The advanced contemporary stuff really caught my eye, because I'd never seen anything like it. It was wonderful, strange and weird, so I just went for it, not in performance, of course, because I was maybe, I don't know, 10 at that point. A little later, when I had some pocket money, I started buying records of some of these things, Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, Xenakis.

Manny Ax: Wow, I see.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: It was all wonderful to me.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: You are the most impeccable and brilliant and overwhelmingly commanding pianist that I can imagine. Do you feel that there's an innate talent for the physicality of piano playing?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I think the thing is, the physicality is nothing without the mind.

Manny Ax: It's really the capacity of your brain to do the things you're doing. I know the fingers are not the issue.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: It was discovered early on that I had perfect pitch, without wanting to boast, because I hate to do that, but I had good predispositions as having a mind for music. I think that's really where it all started.

Manny Ax: It's just that I'm so dazzled by the amount of complex things that go on in the music you play, and how you're in total command of all that.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: My desire to share these things with the public, it entails clarifying everything, any polyphonic structure, any complexities, in order to render them digestible and palatable and as plain as sunshine.

Manny Ax: Now, you listen to a lot of music, you've looked at a lot of music. What do you look for in a piece of music that makes you want to focus on that, learn it, work on it over a period of time.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: It has to strike a chord, of course, but more importantly, it has to have what I think will strike a chord with the audience.

Manny Ax: You're aware of people listening?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I really try to be. To me, I always say a recital, it's an offering, and it's an occasion to share. You can't really share authentically what you don't believe in, or what you're unsure about.

Manny Ax: You love a lot of stuff.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes, I'm a compulsive collector, and I have about maybe 100 crates worth of sheet music at home. I don't know where to put it anymore. [laughs]

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: I'm hoping you can help me answer some questions about classical music from our WQXR listeners. We've invited them to submit their questions, and we're going to do our best to answer them, and if I don't know the answer, I'll just make something up. This is Abraham from New York.

Abraham: How does it work when you have a big orchestral piece and then someone can just play it on the piano. How do they figure out what to play?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Transcriptions for the piano of orchestral pieces are legion. Some of them are very successful. Some of them not so. I think the mistake that you can make is just to try to transfer as many of the notes as possible on the keyboard, and expect two hands to play it. I think it's much better to just do it purely by ear.

Manny Ax: Yes, I think if we tried to play something from a symphony, we'd probably do it more from what we heard than what we saw in the music.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Exactly.

Manny Ax: Right. I think that's how you decide. You hear, "Pa pa pa pa," and you try to approximate that on the piano in whatever best way you can.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: It's very interesting always, because some well-known orchestral pieces have been transcribed by different people, and it's always very interesting to compare.

Manny Ax: Sometimes by the composer himself. La valse of Ravel is a good example. Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky went in the other direction-

Marc-Andre Hamelin: That's right.

Manny Ax: -from piano to orchestra.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: There are several orchestral versions of that.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: That's right.

Manny Ax: It's a time honored tradition, and I think it's coming back a little bit.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I think young people are much, much more attracted to them. There was a time when I was studying that things like that were absolutely taboo. It just wasn't considered a serious pursuit.

Manny Ax: Exactly, but I think now it's much more serious.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Oh, yes. So many of those young people play La valse, as you mentioned.

Manny Ax: Yes. Thank you for the great question.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: Do you practice away from the keyboard?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Oh, that's where I get some of my best ideas.

Manny Ax: It's very hard, isn't it?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: What do you mean?

Manny Ax: If you're practicing at the piano, the mechanism takes over. If you're, let's say, sitting on an airplane, and you have to practice through a piece in your mind, you have to concentrate all the time. It's very hard, I think.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes, but that's when my best ideas are from, because then everything becomes clear, the tempi gets stabilized. I noticed all kinds of details that had never really been apparent or not so apparent to me when I was at the piano, because when you're the piano half of the task is just producing the sound physically, but when you're just thinking, of course, you're free of that encumbrance, so all kinds of wonderful things happen. Then I go to the piano and try to apply these things that they don't always necessarily work, but there will have been an evolution without my even touching one single key.

Manny Ax: You are a prolific composer, very accomplished composer. Does that influence the way you approach playing music of other people?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Entirely. There's many reasons why I think performers should at least try to write a little bit to feel a little closer to the composer of the works they perform, because it's easy to take these pieces of standard repertoire for granted and not realize what the composer went through to actually bring them to reality. Also, composing helps me make better interpretive decisions. It helps me distinguish foreground from background. It clarifies the structure for me and where it's going. It helps me interpret notation better. It really helps me read a score much, much better. It also helps you spot typos and mistakes on a certain microscopic level.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: I'm Manny Ax, and this is Classical Music Happy Hour. We'll return in just a moment.

This is Classical Music Happy Hour. I'm Manny Ax. Let's hear some more of our conversation with Marc-Andre Hamelin. What's your go-to beverage after a long day?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I think plain water is really one of the wonders of the world. What's better than that?

Manny Ax: Do you have a musical hero?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: The printed score. Anything that's communicated to us by composers that's what I go with, and that's what I place my faith in.

Manny Ax: Is there an instrument you wish you'd played? Probably the piano?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes, I wish I played the piano.

Manny Ax: I'm just guessing.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: The piano, it offers me everything. It's my mouthpiece. It's my way of living. It's full of juice. It can do anything. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Manny Ax: What is your favorite musical memory?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I have very great memories from my childhood. My dad was a big Liszt fan, and whenever Christmas rolled around, and we always bought a real tree, not a fake one, so the smell was in the air, he loved to play the Liszt Christmas Tree Suite for himself. I cannot hear this music without smelling the pine needles.

Manny Ax: How lovely. We have another question from one of our listeners. Shall we go to Baton Rouge, Louisiana?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes.

Dick Spirer: Hello. My name is Dick Spirer. I'm retired and live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I always wondered why music was written in different keys. I understand major and minor keys. They convey a mood. I was always taught that the standard octave has half tones between the third and fourth and seventh and eighth notes. If that's so, why would something be written in G or A instead of just leaving it in C without the need to rearrange my head to accommodate the sharps or flats of the various keys? I've made it sound more serious than it is, but it's a question that's been on my mind. Thanks for the opportunity to learn more about music.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Each key, I firmly believe, has a very distinct personality, and many composers have understood that. If you've ever heard Gerald Moore's discussion- he was in one of the most famous collaborative pianists in the century, and accompanied legions of singers, if you hear him discuss about the issue of transposition, because you can't always play one song in the same key depending on the scene-

Manny Ax: Because of the voice, because the singer can only go as so low or so high, so you often have to change the actual key of the song.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Sometimes, depending on the mood of the song, if you go too low or too high, it's going to alter the message of the song drastically, so you have to be careful about that. There is a definite character for each of the keys.

Manny Ax: I think that maybe the actual key of pieces meant more in the 19th century than it does now.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: You do?

Manny Ax: I think so. I think for a composer, there are specific requirements, because a lot of music that used horns, natural horns, would be an E flat. You have a hunting motive very often, because they're horns, so that dictates that key.

[horn playing]

Manny Ax: I think something like C minor-

[notes playing]

Manny Ax: -meant something very specific to Beethoven and Mozart, and maybe less so to Chopin, and even less so to Fauré just in terms of the translation of the key emotional intent.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: There's no question that they all made it their own, but still, sometimes pieces feel like they've been written in the wrong key.

Manny Ax: I'm happy to be wrong and to be corrected.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: There are individual perceptions. Both Messiaen and Scriabin obviously thought very highly of the key of F sharp major, and because they used it both extensively.

Manny Ax: Was it partly because of the way the hand lies on the piano? Do you think?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: No, I think it was simply a question of character. There were both synesthetes, and I think they both saw something in F sharp major, although I think they saw different colors. I don't think they saw the same color, but I could be wrong.

Manny Ax: Beethoven was such a fabulous pianist, obviously. I wonder if some of the keys that he chose were-

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Dictated by.

Manny Ax: -dictated by how it felt under the hand.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Digital considerations, yes, could be.

Manny Ax: Digital considerations like we do now with the iPhone or something.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Exactly.

Manny Ax: Thank you for the question.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: We asked about a piece that you wanted to talk about, and you thought about talking about the Rachmaninoff Études-Tableaux in E flat minor, Opus 39, number five.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: That's right. One of Rachmaninoff's greatest creations among his miniatures.

Manny Ax: Would you be willing to play a few notes?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Sure.

Manny Ax: That would be fabulous.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: At least this one, it's in my fingers.

Manny Ax: That would be Wonderful.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: Wow. What a privilege to hear that performance. That's fabulous. Just fabulous.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Thank you very much.

Manny Ax: Obviously, this is so beautiful and so touching. Is there any way you can put into words what particularly you love about this piece?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I think that the middle section, not only the way it starts, but the harmonic progression and the build up of tension, the rationing of tension, little by little, the harmonic progression makes not that much sense if you view it traditionally, but it's a master lesson in building up tension. I've always really admired that in this piece.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: The contrast between the depth of despair and this ethereal note, the B flat the first time-

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: The E flat the second time, and how, in the middle, it changes from this-- The left hand is going with the incredibly depressed moment.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: Then as it turns to the major, it's like a consolation or something.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: You sound like you've played it.

Manny Ax: Never.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Never?

Manny Ax: Never. I'm ashamed to say I've played no Rachmaninoff, whatsoever.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: You seem to know it intimately.

Manny Ax: It's a piece that deserves to be played the way you play it. There are, in fact, many great performances over the years. I was very lucky. I heard Richter play this live in the '60s in New York at Carnegie Hall. I just wondered, because there's so much beautiful Rachmaninoff music, but you feel this piece is special in the-

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I think it stands out among these études. I can tell you that in that middle section, there is one passage which was never clear to me until I actually-

Manny Ax: Can you show us?

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes, absolutely. Let me get to the piano.

[classical piano music]

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Of course you have--

[classical piano music]

Marc-Andre Hamelin: There's a whole bunch of whole tone scales.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: Oh, wow.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: It goes on.

Manny Ax: I see.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: Wow. He's channeling Debussy.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Yes, I spent a lot of time trying to clarify that texture so that you wouldn't lose--

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: You need the top melody and what's happening underneath.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: In a sneaky way, what you can do is--

[classical piano music]

Marc-Andre Hamelin: If you don't play them absolutely together, you can hear them both.

Manny Ax: I see.

[classical piano music]

Marc-Andre Hamelin: If you play them-

[classical piano music]

Marc-Andre Hamelin: -they're not as clear. There's a way to do that without making it completely mannered.

Manny Ax: Fabulous. You do something very, to me, unusual, in that when the theme returns, you do not overwhelm with sound, because usually it's done much, much louder, I find this so touching.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: At that point, there is no dynamic marking, except for molto marcato, for the theme in the left hand. I have a feeling that Rachmaninoff might not have written fortissimo there. A few bars later at the big climax, he writes triple forte.

Manny Ax: No, but this makes incredibly wonderful sense-

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Oh, thank you.

Manny Ax: -what you do with the arch of the piece. Great. Thank you so much.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Sure. I didn't expect to play all of it, but I got carried away.

Manny Ax: That's okay. I don't mind.

[laughter]

Manny Ax: I think we'll all tolerate it. Marc-Andre Hamelin, thank you so much for being with us today and for the wonderful performance of the Rachmaninoff.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: Thank you. Let's do this every day, shall we?

Manny Ax: With pleasure.

Marc-Andre Hamelin: I wouldn't mind.

Manny Ax: With pleasure. Anytime.

[classical piano music]

Manny Ax: I'm Manny Ax and this is Classical Music Happy Hour. Classical Music Happy Hour is supported in part by the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation and by Linda Nelson. Our production team includes Lauren Purcell-Joiner, Eileen Delahunty, Laura Boyman, Elizabeth Nonamaker, David Norville, Christine Herskovits, and Ed Yim. Our engineering team includes George Wellington, Irene Trudel, and Chase Culpon.

Classical Music Happy Hour is produced by WQXR in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

 

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