Late Piano Music

GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE AWARD NOMINATION 2014

'Busoni was one of the great free-thinkers of twentieth century music, with a virtuoso's understanding of the piano. As with Liszt, it's easy to concentrate on the scintillating, barn-storming elements and miss the serious thinker. Marc-André Hamelin finds both the necessary swagger and the strange, almost recondite poetry - dazzling in parts, ultimately haunting.' BBC Music Magazine Award Nomination 2015 - Instrumental

'Hamelin mastered its rising and falling cascades of scales, biting rhythms and thunderous textures as though he was Busoni himself' (The Birmingham News, USA)

"Such strangeness demands rare skill and a special empathy for an idiom which for many will seem recondite and remote. And it is in this sense that Hamelin, playing with unfaltering lucidity and authority, achieves an astonishing triumph even by his exalted standards...although this is essentially an album for specialists, it is one that could never be bettered." Gramophone Magazine, November 2013

"Hamelin handles all of this with great intelligence. There's a swagger when the music demands it, a fabulously refined sense of sonority and transparency when required. The technical challenges are surmounted so effortlessly that you begin to take the confidence of his playing for granted, when in fact it's a remarkable achievement." The Guardian, 31st October 2013 ****