In his booklet-essay RC notes that ‘when critical reparations are meted out, Max Reger should be first in line to receive them’. Well, I can’t think of any solo artist better qualified than Marc-Andre Hamelin to help bring that about. Others have courageously fought the cause of this complex and neglected repertoire, but few, if any, have brought to it such a compelling fusion of temperament, intellect and prodigious pianistic fluency. Another huge bonus is Hyperion’s recording, made in Bristol at St George’s, Brandon Hill, which makes for a sound quality at once glowing and well ventilated.
Would that the music itself were a little more so. The Bach Variations in particular are suffocatingly dense and they culminate in a terminally constipated double fugue. You only have to think of Brahms’s Handel Variations or Beethoven’s Diabelli (and Reger’s formal design makes it hard not to think of them) to realize that contrivance is doing duty for inventive revelation, short-winded elaboration for the broad dramatic sweep. This was the piece the great Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker singled out as a ‘counter-example’ to illustrate the German tradition gone wrong; his premises may be debatable, but I’m at one with the conclusion.
The later Telemann Variations look somewhat lighter on the page but are still written, in effect, in Gothic script. Reger’s obsessive filling-in of registral space again gives his textures a stifling, agoraphobic feel, though it’s not the density of thought and opulence of texture in themselves which are offputting, so much as the suspicion that they have become ends rather than means. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that much of this music strikes me as no more than high-class note-spinning.
You don’t expect humour of a Reger Humoresque, any more than you do caprice of a Brahms Capriccio. Sure enough, what you get here is a professorial kind of light touch, which extends only as far as putting on Hungarian costume for a brief but ponderous czardas. If there seems to be a momentarily charming hint of irony in the second of the set, that is more Hamelin’s conceit than Reger’s, achieved by turning the composer’s tenuto markings into staccatos and ignoring the prescribed grandezza (though I must stress that otherwise Hamelin’s faithfulness to the letter of the score is as unimpeachable as his virtuosity).
I realize that I’m doing no more here than restating the kind of negative views that must enrage Reger enthusiasts, and I hope RL’s next ‘Quarterly retrospect’ will pick up this issue and offer a second opinion. I’d really like nothing more than to come out one day as a Reger convert. But as so often in the past, I find the promise of succulence leads only to the taste of pith and pips.'