This classic first recording of the 14 piano sonatas makes Medtner’s star soar into the ascendant. Superlatively played and presented, it effects a radical and triumphant transition from years of indifference to heady acclaim. True, Medtner was celebrated by Rachmaninov as “the greatest composer of our time” and championed by pianists such as Moiseiwitsch, Horowitz and Gilels, yet his music fell largely on deaf ears. Such irony and enigma lie in the music itself, in its distinctive character, colour and fragrance. Listeners were understandably suspicious of music that yields up its secrets so unreadily, almost as if Medtner wished it to remain in a private rather than public domain. Moments of a ravishing, heart-stopping allure, and heroics on the grandest of scales are apt to occur within an indigestible, prolix and recondite context. On paper (and it is virtually impossible to appreciate or consider Medtner without a score) everything is comprehensible, yet the results are never quite what you expect. Much of the writing, too, is formidably complex, with rhythmic intricacies deriving from Brahms and whimsicalities from Schumann supporting a recognizably Slavic yet wholly personal idiom.
Such writing positively demands a transcendental technique and a burning poetic commitment, a magical amalgam achieved with delicacy, drama and finesse by Marc-Andre Hamelin. Interspersing the sonatas with groups of miniatures containing some of Medtner’s most felicitous ideas, he plays with an authority suggesting that such music is truly his language. Wherever you turn you will find a stylistic consistency and aplomb that make you realize that mastery of Medtner’s difficulties requires a reflex and elegance beyond mere physical preparation, a capacity to absorb, away from the keyboard, a plethora of ideas, and resolve them into an unfaltering lucidity. In the Third Sonata from the trilogy, Op. 11, you may question Hamelin’s urbanity at 0'45'', yet his coolness in one of Medtner’s most insinuating melodies contains its own sense of nuance and inflexion, is quite without underlining or idiosyncrasy and is of an unimpeachable honesty. Again, just when you have decided – particularly if you are Russian – that Hamelin plays as easily as a fish swims in water, you are confronted by the sort of physical force and concentration at 3'36'' in the G minor Sonata’s appassionato and pleno that betoken a true virtuoso.
Then there is Hamelin’s way with The Night Wind Sonata, its opening as brooding and disconsolate as even the most ardent lover of the darker Slavonic passions could wish. Whether stentato in the Faurean rapture commencing at 6'40'' or fortissimo affannato (where Medtner allows the primeval chaos stressed in some prefatory lines by Tyutchev to break through), Hamelin achieves an unfaltering sense of continuity, a balance of sense and sensibility in music that threatens to become submerged in its own passion.
From epic to miniature and the Forgotten Melodies, their title a testimony of so many forms of nostalgia, to pain and happiness, abandon and introspection. Certainly in the start and finish of Op. 38 Medtner creates a minor/major key, bittersweet resolution made wondrous by Hamelin’s luminous sense of sonority and texture. “Alla reminiscenza: quasi coda” may be a mere two pages in length yet in Hamelin’s hands it emerges among the most perfect of miniatures, with everything romantically and, indeed, ecstatically said. Conversely, Hamelin’s dizzying reel through the “Danza festiva” and his subtle and vertiginous brilliance in the “Primavera” (a rippling, multicoloured flight into the azure) once again make technique and musicianship inseparable considerations. Clearly, I could continue in this vein, yet to do so would be to compromise a sense of overall accomplishment and mastery, qualities held in unfailing counterpoise and equilibrium. Readers uncertain of Medtner’s elusive art should try the Forgotten Melodies (and most of all “Alla reminiscenza”), the Sonata Triad and, by contrast, the simple Elysium conjured in the first movement of the Sonate-idylle. None the less, such heaven-sent performances will set you journeying far and wide, their eloquence and calibre accentuated by Hyperion’s sound, by clarity, warmth and refinement.
Comparisons are, in a sense, irrelevant, given the comprehensive nature of Hamelin’s undertaking. Yet all true lovers of Medtner’s muse will turn to Hamish Milne’s and Geoffrey Tozer’s continuing series of the complete solo piano music (four and five volumes on CRD and Chandos, respectively) and to deeply personal performances of a true Russian vintage from Moiseiwitsch (the G minor Sonata, Op. 22; Gramo – nla), Gilels (the G minor Sonata, Op. 22, formerly on Melodiya – nla, and the Sonata reminiscenza, Op. 38 No. 1, the latter live from his 1969 Carnegie Hall recital) and, more recently, to Demidenko, whose outstanding performances of the Sonata elegia (No. 2 from the Sonata Trilogy), the Sonata tragica (Op. 39 No. 5) and Sonata reminiscenza appear, like Hamelin’s, on Hyperion.'