A virtuoso strives to outgrow his niche

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who performs at Jordan Hall tomorrow night, is known for tackling music that is difficult to play. (tina foster)

Marc-André Hamelin has made a name for himself by dint of two principal strengths: intellectual curiosity and stellar technical ability.

The former has led him to revive and champion obscure, often forgotten repertoire. (Quick: name another pianist who's recorded either Paul Dukas's piano sonata or Charles-Valentin Alkan's Symphony for Solo Piano, never mind both.) Much of that music is criminally difficult to play, and Hamelin's second strength - a technique that seems to know no limitations - allows him to bring it off with what looks like astonishingly little effort. Just check out a few of the many clips of him on YouTube.

Yet the Canadian-born Hamelin, who makes his Celebrity Series debut tomorrow night at Jordan Hall, never intended to carve out a niche for himself as the go-to pianist for the weird and the wild. "That impression is created mostly because of my recordings," he says by phone from his home in Newton. "If you go to my recitals, I play standard repertoire all the time.

"All I really want to do is expand the level of appreciation for this unrecorded repertoire," he continues. "But at the same time, Mozart and Chopin and Schumann and Schubert and Haydn and Beethoven are just as essential a part of me as a musician."

He's equally wary of being identified solely with his technical skills, as a guy who can play a lot of notes very quickly and very accurately. "I wish I could get rid of that virtuoso nonsense," he says. "Being called a virtuoso, if you really know the meaning of the term, it's actually very flattering. But in most people's minds it denotes a kind of keyboard athleticism and nothing else."

Explaining his drive to conquer complex pieces, he says, "When I really am convinced about the worth of a piece, anything is possible, and I will do whatever it takes. . . . God knows, I do not enjoy playing difficult music. I wish this music would all be easy. But I do it because musically I am convinced by it. I mean, why work on something just to flex your muscles? At 46 years of age, I think if I was ever at that stage, I'm past it now."

Fittingly, tomorrow's program offers a much more balanced picture of Hamelin, giving the lie to his image as a specialist in hard-to-play esoterica. It begins with two sonatas by Haydn, a composer he plays marvelously, with equal parts wit and understanding. Last year Hamelin released a two-disc set of Haydn sonatas that was one of the year's highlights. (Another set will follow in 2009.) "It's full of life and so rewarding, time and time again," he says. "I can't possibly get tired of this music - the rewards are very rich."

Still, Hamelin can rarely resist offering his audiences some unfamiliar fare, and this time it's "Sonata in a State of Jazz" by Alexis Weissenberg, well known as a pianist but whose compositional efforts are almost completely unknown.

"I've actually had the score since sometime in the early 1990s," Hamelin explains. "Weissenberg's harmonic language is so involved and so chromatically gnarly, the impression you might get by trying to sight-read it would almost undoubtedly be detrimental. You have to spend the time with it and try to form the proper aesthetic view of it. I made a few tries and I abandoned it two or three times, because I couldn't understand the harmonies. Then I started to live with them, and now I think everything makes absolutely perfect sense, even though it's like nothing you ever heard."

Rounding out the program are works by Chopin, two Liszt arrangements of Schubert songs, and Villa-Lobos's very odd "Rudepoema," a 20-minute piece written as a musical portrait of its dedicatee, Arthur Rubinstein. Those who know Rubinstein only by his urbane, sophisticated pianism will likely be shocked by its blunt dissonances and hammering rhythms. "It's a tremendously exciting piece with quite a bit of musical worth, although it's really very bizarre - one episode after another with peaks and valleys," Hamelin says. "As a whole, it's quite riveting and deserves to be heard every so often."

It's a program that should confirm that Hamelin is much more than the possessor of 10 dexterous fingers. "Being a true virtuoso actually entails sort of a marshaling of every ounce of craft that you have," he says, "not only corporal but also mental and emotional, and using whatever aesthetic knowledge is at one's disposal to bring these works to life."

617-482-6661, celebrityseries.org

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