I'm good with slow. I've been to lots of movies I hated but none that was too slow for me. As an audience member, I have what they call good Sitzfleisch. I may soon have to put down "Parsifal" because it's a bit peppy for me. I can say with honesty that the supreme listening experience of my life to date was a sitar recital by Nikhil Banerjee. It was in the 70s in Old St. John Church in Berkeley (which I mention because the pews were harder than the seats at Bayreuth).
Banerjee came out from his "set break" a little before Midnight and struck up what turned out to be an early-morning raga. All the Indian heads in the audience started wagging in that left-to-right motion that signals deep assent, as my more knowledgeable concertmate whispered that this meant that Banerjee-ji was going to play that one raga until dawn. Some essential part of me is still there.
I say all this because there is a recording I think you need to know about. It is super-virtuoso Mark-Andre Hamelin's new CD of Morton Feldman's "For Bunita Marcus" (Hyperion). It took me seven listenings to get all the way through it, and I'll take the rap for that. I'm generally a big fan of Feldman's music, including the six-hour String Quartet II. When my review copy of the new CD arrived, I tore off its adult-proof plastic wrap in my zeal to hear it, wherein may have lain my mistake.
Hamelin includes a fascinating program essay that includes a recommendation that you listen to this CD at the lowest volume you can tolerate, or hear. It's marked pianississimo at the start, and there are no dynamic changes thereafter. As for the sonics, it's literally sustain pedal to the metal with few breaks throughout. There are more expansive recordings of this meditative piece, but Hamelin rips through it in a mollusculal 72 minutes. My cup of room-temperature tea, I would have thought.
Hamelin's hard-earned love of this piece is significant, given that his repertoire has elsewhere leaned heavily into unusual repertoire, most of which lies beyond mortal pianists' technique - but that Hamelin can play the way you and I inhale and exhale. It wasn't a plus for me to learn, from Hamelin, that while the rest of us are, if we're doing it right, zoning out, or in, listening, the pianist is counting like a motherfucker.
Somewhere around the hour mark it reaches a level of aural excitement equivalent of hearing a partner talk in his sleep. If this sounds like your cup of Sanka, run don't walk.
Finally, concentrate though I tried, I was never fully able to dislodge from my wool-gathering mind the fact that Bunita Marcus, a fellow composer from whom Feldman was "inseparable" for seven years, has now credibly charged that he sexually molested her and other women, and stole her ideas. Somehow, I find getting past Wagner's virulent anti-Semitism easier.
It's possible that Hamelin has recorded as relatively little Liszt as he has because it's too easy for him. But another CD you need to know about-one at the farthest extreme from Hamelin's-is "Liszt Transfigured" (Linn) by Hong Kong-born pianist Chiyan Wong.
The fare is four of Liszt's "Operatic Fantasies for Piano," edited and in one case completed by the performing pianist. Liszt wrote a fair number of these fantasies and "reminiscences" on themes from famous operas, and they're all bears to play. The only familiar item on Wong's program is the "Reminiscences de 'Don Juan' de Mozart," in as imaginative a performance of it as I have heard. When "La ci darem la mano" makes its late appearance, it's with tear-inducing tenderness. He ends with a "Fantaisie" on themes from Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro," the item with his own completion.
In a substantive, fascinating program essay, the pianist discusses the time-honored but more controversial than ever player's practice with this music of coloring outside the lines, relative to the printed score. It's still anathema to certain pedagogues, but it only takes performances like Wong's - deeply invested in both Liszt's imaginative "reminiscences" of these scores, and partnering in exploiting all of the (now modern) piano's resources to realize them - to make his case.
His technique is a match for any pianist of our time, and what he shares with, say, Yuja Wang, is a dizzying capacity to play thunderclaps of chords and lightning strikes of delicate runs as though the sun were shining through it all, every note audible and in place. The very rare "Grande fantaisie" on Pacini's "Niobe" that opens the disc is a continuously unfolding wonder. Wong's command is such that there's time and place for delicacy, charm, feeling and playfulness (at a very high level), too.