When I catch up with Marc-André Hamelin via the joys of Zoom, he’s at Tanglewood, coaching some lucky young musicians in typically offbeat Hamelin territory: Debussy’s arrangement of Schumann’s Canonic Études for pedal piano, and a masterclass featuring Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op 25, and some Carl Vine. ‘Those youngsters are really enterprising, I think.’ As enterprising as he is when it comes to repertoire.

With a discography of over 80 albums and a relationship with Hyperion that has flourished for nearly three decades, he more than most has brought musical rarities back to life. His combination of super-fast mind and matching fingers is responsible for our renewed appreciation of works from the Chopin-Godowsky Études and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! to Busoni’s Piano Concerto, not to mention resurrecting composers such as Alkan and Feinberg among more familiar fare from Haydn and Schubert. But we’re here to discuss a composer whom he hasn’t previously recorded: Gabriel Fauré.

It has become something of a trope among musicians I’ve spoken to – particularly those at the top of their game and with a full diary – that lockdown brought certain artistic benefits, sometimes unexpected ones. Marc-André Hamelin is no exception, and, without the pandemic, there might, possibly, have been no Fauré album, let alone a densely filled two-disc set, with the complete nocturnes and barcarolles rounded out by Dolly, for which he is joined by his wife Cathy Fuller on the piano stool. I’m intrigued to hear what brought him, finally, to Fauré.

‘I’ve long had a very intense attraction to the period straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, simply because I find it’s the most interesting one language-wise – tonal harmony has started to break down, brought on initially by Liszt and Wagner but continued by so many people, and late-Romantic France in particular has given me a lot of joy. That includes Fauré, of course, but over all these years I’ve had exactly three pieces of his solo music in my repertoire – the Sixth Nocturne, Third Barcarolle and something I couldn’t include in this project, the Second Impromptu. I learnt the last two of these when I was still in Canada, so I’ve known them a very long time, whereas the Nocturne is a much more recent addition. Of course, I play the Ballade for piano and orchestra too, but I guess in the back of my mind there was always the unconscious desire to explore Fauré further.’

Characteristically, the results sound as if Hamelin has been on convivial terms with the Frenchman for decades. ‘I knew that delving into the world of Fauré’s piano music would be a rather extraordinary adventure,’ he says, ‘and that’s exactly what it’s turned out to be. I found, to my delight, even more sophistication, even more sensuality, substance and beauty than I’d expected. It’s one of those mysteries in music that I find so attractive: when you look at something and think, how did he manage this, and you can’t quite explain it.’

I must say that the experience of listening through the two discs, hearing the pieces in chronological order – which I wouldn’t necessarily advise in terms of intensity overload – did confirm to me how early on Fauré sounds like no one else, his harmony every bit as characteristic as, say, that of Scriabin or Medtner. But I struggle to analyse why Fauré sounds like Fauré.

‘In a way perhaps it’s best not analysing it, and just be drawn into what he does. I feel that if you absolutely want to find out, it’s a bit like killing the goose that lays the golden egg – you’ll find yourself with guts and nothing else!’

I’m intrigued by how fast Hamelin has gone from having three solo pieces in his repertoire to this recording of the complete barcarolles and nocturnes, which demonstrates with such quiet flair and understanding the seismic shift from youth to old age, from songfulness to something much more austere, not to mention the devastating effect of the composer’s increasing deafness. How had Hamelin gone about getting inside this music?

His answer is simple: ‘I just sight-read them repeatedly,’ he says. And in three days, they were perfect?! He laughs ruefully: ‘Oh my god I wish! That is one thing that the pandemic really facilitated – even with the anguish that we all experienced, I felt I had more leisure to really take my time with this project, as I think it needed. So I didn’t hurry at all, and of course the more time you spend with this music, the more fully it reveals itself.’

One of the things I’ve found endlessly fascinating in my own exploration of the composer over decades is the way he can remain so ungraspable to even the most ardent listener; just thinking of the chamber music, for example, and the journey from the immediacy of the two early violin sonatas to the extraordinary ‘otherness’ of the late cello sonatas, the String Quartet and the Piano Trio. It’s frustrating that the works of Fauré that do have a wider currency – the Requiem, the Pavane and the Élégie – give such a one-sided sense of the wonder of his music.

But then, even in his own lifetime, Fauré was out of step with fashion. He studied at the École Niedermeyer rather than the Paris Conservatoire, and when he was naming his works plain old ‘nocturne’, ‘barcarolle’ or ‘impromptu’, others were grabbing attention with increasingly evocative titles: while Fauré was composing his Sixth Nocturne and Fifth Barcarolle in 1894, Debussy was causing a quiet revolution with the Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune; 19 years later, Stravinsky was causing a noisier sensation with The Rite of Spring, precisely as Fauré was paring things back with his Eleventh Nocturne and Barcarolles Nos 10 and 11.

As Hamelin got to know the nocturnes and barcarolles, were there any where he began with one view of the music, only for this to be transmuted dramatically as he became more intimately familiar with it? He ponders, before answering carefully: ‘I think in the case of almost all the pieces something would reveal itself – a little detail or sometimes a big one – even if it was just a change of fingering, or a hand distribution, which would alter the physiognomy and also the musical result of the passage in question; to me that was progress, and a further step in shaping a final interpretation.’

I have the sense that Fauré’s music presents endless layers: that, as a performer, the deeper you delve, the more it reveals itself. ‘There is so much to savour in these pieces that one thing I had to guard against was indulging in excessive rubato and putting little ritardandos all over the place’ Hamelin says. ‘I later discovered that Fauré, quite rightly, preferred a more direct approach, without too much fussing about. And there were some pieces’ he continues, ‘such as the Thirteenth Nocturne, which really took a while to reveal themselves. But once they did, it was a real “wow” moment – one of those times when I feel so lucky to be playing this music.’

Listening to his performances back to back in preparation for this interview, I was struck not only by the sheer emotional intensity of Fauré’s world but also how Hamelin’s readings seem part of a lineage that goes back to the Franco-Dutch pianist Germaine Thyssens-Valentin, who, more than anyone, brought this music back into the light after the composer’s death. (Anyone who hasn’t discovered her recordings, reissued on Testament, should put that right forthwith!) But to go back to the present, I wondered how Hamelin’s experience of making this recording might feed into his concert programming.

‘This music is much too important to remain peripheral, but one of the problems with it is – particularly for young people – it’s almost completely devoid of any kind of flash. Flash that young people not only crave but think is necessary to make an impact. Whereas what’s involved in making Fauré sound good at the piano is so intricate. The pedalling alone can offer tremendous problems. And, because I’m a big one for clarity, in every conceivable sense, I wanted these wonderful ideas, the extraordinary harmony and counterpoint and the sinuousness of the texture to come out as unobtrusively and beautifully as possible.’

Given that Fauré is still quite a hard sell, had Hyperion needed much arm-twisting? ‘No, not at all. I’d thought they would, because they still have Kathy Stott’s cycle, which, though from a while ago, is as wonderful as ever.’

And then of course there’s another Dolly on the label, from Steven Osborne and Paul Lewis. This new one has a refreshing lack of sentimentality about it; charm, yes, but plenty of piquancy, and a wonderfully characterful closing Spanish Dance. Hamelin is clearly proud of their achievement: ‘It was entirely my idea: Cathy would never have imposed herself on one of my recordings, but I’ve wanted us to work together for a long time and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. We worked hard: this wasn’t just a case of getting to the piano and it clicking immediately. But, in the best possible way, we got to know each other musically – it was a delightful experience. And we are both very satisfied with the musical result.’

In the light of this experience, is there more Fauré to come? ‘Not right now, but I do have more recordings in the can.’ As he reels them off – another album of his own piano music (for Hyperion), Joan Tower’s Piano Concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on its own label and a live Turangalîla with the Toronto Symphony on Harmonia Mundi – I’m forcefully reminded of Hamelin’s joyously unbounded musical curiosity.

Marc-André Hamelin’s new Hyperion album of Fauré’s Nocturnes and Barcarolles is reviewed in the September 2023 issue of International Piano.