I am currently in London for work, attending DrupalCon. I had hoped to see Emanuel Ax play a Brahms piano concerto at the Proms but it was sold out and things just didn’t work out. Last night I was wanting to see Marc-André Hamelin’s Proms performance. We ended up getting free transportation and tickets to Batman Live and I was afraid it was going to trip up my plans. According to the pamphlet the Proms is “THE WORLD’S GREATEST CLASSICAL MUSIC FESTIVAL,” is “in its 117th season” and spans “90 concerts over 58 days.” It really is like nothing I have seen before. I guess the closest would be the Gina Bachauer concerts that I used to attend, but for me, really there is little comparison. As a classical music fan looking in, the Proms seems pretty awesome.
Perhaps the Royal Albert Hall had something to do with it.
A little while ago I watched a clip of Evgeny Kissin playing in a, I thought, kind of strange setting where the piano was placed amid the audience with audience members sitting a few feet away. Pretty sure it was the Royal Albert Hall.
A coworker went with me, we bought tickets for sixteen pounds and sat in box seats. At first, I thought, “man this guy is awful, didn’t dress up and the composition is even worse.”
Turns out that was the piano tuner.
A man introduced the performance and mentioned that this was the only Proms solo piano recital this year. I thought that rather amazing. I mean who doesn’t like a piano recital? Apparently much of London. Perhaps it is unfair to compare, but Batman Live had quite a few more attendees that the performance. It looked to us like the hall was maybe a third filled and that’s not counting the upper sections which were almost entirely empty.
Tonight’s program was in honor of the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s birth. I thought the program a touch obscure. Based on Spotify and Rhapsody I would say the program was arranged in order of obscurity. Between Spotify and Rhapsody I found one recording of Legend No. 2, ‘St Francis of Paola Walking on the Water’ and just a few of Fantasia and Fugue on B-A-C-H with most of them being on the organ. The third piece (Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude) turned not as rare as I might have thought. It appeared generally as part of its larger set. The last set of pieces (Venezia e Napoli) is pretty common as it is from the Années de pèlerinage.
Guess I have seen some pretty great pianists live in my day, including Vladimir Feltsman and Martha Argerich but I would have to put Hameln in that class. I have been playing the piano a bit of late and working on playing relaxed and with minimal effort which I find quite difficult. Generally I could see Hamelin’s left hand and even in the most difficult of passages it just looked effortless. Like he could play octaves for hours. Fwiw, maybe one of the most amazing things I have experienced was a series of I think fifteen piano recitals covering the works of Bach performed in not many more than fifteen days by Father Sean Duggan. I just checked and somehow Rhapsody and Spotify have never heard of him.
I have a cd or two of Hamelin playing and in the past I thought he generally played impossibly hard pieces, some of which he composed or arranged. Like his work on the Liszt and Chopin etudes where he in my reading made them much harder. You know since La Campanella and the like are so easy. Kind of like Liszt but more showy, maybe Liszt++. After hearing the program and listening to some youtube recordings tonight I will have to revisit Hamelin a bit.
I found Hamelin amazingly musical. I could not believe the grace with which he played. The Paola Walking on the Water piece (which I had only previously heard in preparation for this event) had a rather crazy left hand and the melody just sang through. Sang. And at times so softly. Elsewhere, regardless of what else was going on I could clearly hear the B-A-C-H motive throughout the piece.
We had a pretty good shot of the piano internals and I don’t know that I saw a stray hammer raised. 
The hammers lifted in isolation. I just mean that Hamelin seemed to be very exact in his playing. Now I didn’t have as good a view when I saw Argerich or really many pianists play, but I thought I would at least occasionally see the stray hammer, but I don’t think I ever did. For sure didn’t hear stray hammers hitting the strings, I am saying didn’t even see a stray hammer raised.
Hamelin played a couple encores and the first seemed familiar but the second wasn’t so much. I hate to say it, but I was hoping he’d break out one of his Liszt etude arrangements. I wonder if Hamelin has tired of playing super crazy technical pieces like Alkan or the cadenza at the end of this hungarian rhapsody. I wonder if other concert pianists have a hard time relating to Hamelin because of his rather transcendent technique. Not that Lang Lang, Arcadi Volodos, Kissin and the like are slouches but can they really keep up with Hamelin in his prime?
The Proms sells standing tickets for five pounds on the day of the concert, so even for sold out events, you might be able to get in. You can see some folks standing right next to the piano, and yeah, they were there as Hamelin played. Maybe five feet away? So yes, pretty sure the Kissin I saw was at Royal Albert Hall.
I hate to say that it saddened me that there was only one solo piano program for the Proms, it was performed by a world class pianist, it was in a world class venue in a pretty awesome town, tickets were at most sixteen pounds and the venue was largely empty. The concert started at ten p.m. and perhaps the relative obscurity of the program contributed. And did I mention the thousands of people at Batman Live? Face value of our free Batman Live tickets was twenty-seven pounds fifty.
While I’m here I should mention that while for me Batman Live was perhaps a touch pedestrian there was this
screen or something used as a backdrop that handled scene changes. It was pretty dang slick. I think such a thing could revolutionize the industry, but guess we’ll see. It spanned the back part of the stage, looked pretty much like a huge high definition monitor and had a hole in the center that folks walked through.
Back in the day, like twenty years ago I thought I could make it as a concert pianist. Course I wasn’t really any good and I didn’t really have any idea about the music world, but wow, really what chance do folks have to make it as performers if this concert got that sort of turn out? I guess the nights featuring concertos have been selling out. It might not work out, but think I will try to get standing tickets for the sold out Saturday night concert which features rather well-known works by Mozart and Beethoven. I am betting Royal Albert Hall is even more magical when sold out.
(picture taken several minutes before the concert started)
We got back to the hotel about 12:30 and thought the train station looked pretty cool. Almost looks like it is daytime to me. I have to give a shout out to my Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS10. It took all the pictures featured in this post, pretty well all of them in quite low-light conditions.
Edited to add: there’s a recording of the concert over on the BBC website. Thanks to the crosseyed pianist for the link.