Of all the different genres of classical music, the operatic transcription and operatic fantasy must be the lowliest. Dozens if not hundreds of these showpieces were composed during the 19th century, when the travelling piano virtuoso became the star of the musical world.
These 'titans of the keyboard' wanted to show off their superhuman ability to play rapid glittery passagework and execute dazzlingly difficult leaps, or conjure huge sound-worlds that rivalled an orchestra in colour and power. And to do that they needed a different sort of piece; the austere counterpoint of Bach or the sinewy sonatas of Beethoven just wouldn’t do. And so they hit on the idea of composing their own showpieces, by taking melodies from Italian operas and spinning heroically difficult sets of variations on them. It saved them from the bother of inventing their own material, and helped to draw an audience, as the melodies were already enormously popular. If the piece stuck closely to the melodies of the original opera it would be called a 'transcription'; if it wandered off into realms of poetic fantasy, loosely based on the opera, it would be called a 'fantasy'.
The genre fell out of fashion, along with the entire school of virtuoso composer-pianists for which it was such an effective vehicle. In recent years one or two pianists have tried the revive the idea of the virtuoso pianist who also composes fabulously glittery and elaborate variations on popular tunes—though the tunes are now more likely to be from the Great American Songbook than Italian opera. The most awesomely impressive of this new breed is undoubtedly the French-Canadian Marc-André Hamelin.
His new CD offers five pieces that veer more towards the operatic fantasy, by two composer-pianists who were the piano kings of Paris during the 1830s and 40s: Franz Liszt and Sigismund Thalberg. They were great rivals, interestingly different in style, and once took part in a 'battle of the pianists' in a salon of an exiled Italian princess. Liszt was said to have won, but as the liner notes point out Thalberg had his champions and his triumphant tours of North and South America still lay ahead of him.
Hamelin, peerless virtuoso that he is, combines the virtues of both. Like Thalberg, he sits stock-still at the piano like the Unmoved Mover, his hands a blur of movement, his face completely impassive. In the Fantasy on themes from Rossini’s Moses he executes to perfection Thalberg’s trademark device of surrounding a melody in the centre of the piano with swirls of arpeggios on either side, creating the impression the pianist has three hands. Liszt’s pieces are less purely beautiful and more grand in conception, and here too Hamelin excels, thrilling us with the vast craggy opening of the 'Paraphrase de Concert' on melodies from Verdi’s Ernani. Hamelin doesn’t go all the way in aiming for that vast cloudiness of sound which Liszt himself seems to have preferred; for instance in the terrific ending to the same piece, where Liszt asks for the sustaining pedal to be depressed throughout each bar, Hamelin raises it by degrees, achieving a nice balance between bracing clarity and grandeur.
The most impressive piece on the CD is the one Liszt himself described as a 'monster': a set of six variations on a march from Bellini’s I Puritani (The Puritans), composed by six different composers, with linking passages and an introduction and tumultuous epilogue composed by Liszt himself. Liszt’s tremendously bravura way of rounding off each variation also serves to show how much better a composer he is—but there’s one point where Liszt’s underhand trick backfires. Chopin’s limpidly beautiful variation, which lofts Bellini’s ordinary little melody onto a different plane, makes everybody else’s contributions seem a tad cheap—including Liszt’s. But Hamelin plays everything, inspired or indifferent, sublime or vulgar, with the same loving care. His motto, like the virtuosos of old is—it ain’t what you play, it’s the way that you play it.