Francis Pott’s rarefied booklet notes to this latest release from Marc-André Hamelin focus its essence. Tennyson’s ‘I am a part of all that I have met.’ Gerald Finzi’s ‘To shake hands with a good friend over the centuries is a pleasant thing’. ‘A kind of commentary’, he suggests, ‘that announces, like a carved name on a cathedral wall, “I, a musical traveller, was here and recorded my response for you who come after”.’ Across nine works spanning a period from 2011 to 2020 we meet with the wraiths, companions, allusions and images, the fingerprint sonorities and pianistic horizons, the musings and improvisations, the ‘sleeves of memory’ of an artist’s life. Rachmaninov, Liszt, Alkan … Chopin, Medtner, Reger … the ‘mental fireworks’ of Godowsky. It’s a compelling, powerful cocktail.

A pianist-composer in the grand tradition of past greats, Hamelin channels his thoughts through largely episodic or variation structures, the larger one here (2011) drawing on Paganini, the shorter (2020) on Beethoven. An 11-minute Pavane variée (2014) and nine-minute Chaconne (2013), to an extent also the closing Toccata on L’homme armé, a Jovian display piece written for the 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, maintain the dynamic. Four ‘parts’ (the aphoristic fourth a mere 18 seconds long) comprise the Barcarolle commissioned by the 2013 Ruhr Piano Festival, a profound, penetrative essay ‘on the very edge of silence’ orbiting darker regions of soul, place and processional. Perspicaciously, Pott evokes Ruskin’s ‘a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak, so quiet … that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow’ (The Stones of Venice). The six-movement Suite à l’ancienne (2019) – a wonderland of Kapustin, Ravel, Godowsky and others, of étude and Hamelian fantasy-arabesque – dresses Baroque dance and air in brilliant garb, gravity basses, splintered glass trebles and any manner of counterpointed textures between making for an infinitely peopled, conversing canvas. My Feelings About Chocolate (2014, essentially legato chordal, a tang of Satie and Feldman in the mix) and Meditation on Laura (2011, on David Raksin’s 1944 jazz standard) take us down other roads. ‘You’re alone in a bar,’ says the score, ‘you’re playing for an audience of none except you.’ Given Hamelin’s imaginative wizardry and tooled super-pianism, along with Oscar Torres’s balanced engineering and a desirably responsive Steinway in the frame (Henry Wood Hall), this is an album pianophiles will not want to miss.