The ever unpredictable Marc-Andre Hamelin takes a saunter on the sassy side in his new Hyperion album In a State of Jazz.Here is a pianist who can be guaranteed to put an unexpected punch into a Haydn Allegro and run from the clicking of castanets to the sultriest of siestas in Albeniz's Ib�ria; now the adventurous Canadian sets his sights and fingers on four composers who have been bitten by the jazz bug.You can find DVDs around town of Friedrich Gulda playing Mozart but Hamelin has settled on three of Gulda's so-called Exercises - witty boogies and ballads designed to loosen up classical fingers.The pianist's take on Gulda's highly energised Prelude and Fugue might set Bach's wig permanently off-kilter if its strains were to drift heavenwards.Hamelin rips into a wacky Jazz Sonata by George Antheil, the self-styled bad boy of music.It's a dizzying collage, seven decades before the cut-and-paste tactics of John Zorn.Then there is the case of the Russian Nikolai Kasputin, whose Sonata sounds as if Prokofiev had found himself a gig in a post-bop piano bar.
Hamelin is crisp and not afraid to swing, especially in the first movement's finger-tangling second theme which sounds like it could do with a good stride bass - except there is not a hand or even a finger to spare.Alex Weissenberg's 1982 Sonata comes across as a little more contrived than anything else on this disc, although Hamelin's virtuosity turns its atonal Charleston into a flurry of glittering sequins.Finally, Weissenberg's transcriptions of six songs by the French chansonnier Charles Trenet have been re-transcribed by Hamelin from Weissenberg's recordings. These are frothy charmers, not so far from classy Liberace, music for the boulevard cafe of your dreams. We can only hope there is enough material out there for Hamelin to consider a sequel.In the meantime, with Michael Houstoun's Inland in the charts proving there is an audience for our own piano composers, perhaps some enterprising pianist might record Jenny McLeod's two rock sonatas. They certainly deserve a merrier fate than languishing in the archives waiting for the attentions of an errant musicologist.* Marc-Andr� Hamelin: In a State of Jazz (Hyperion CDA 67656, through Ode Records)
