Piano recordings do not come much more exhilarating (or entertaining) than Marc-André Hamelin’s survey of some of his own recent works. Listening to one of the most formidably complex musical minds of today is a rare and rewarding privilege: prepare to be astonished.

In their first release on harmonia mundi, Gustavo Gimeno and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra offer us a dazzling reading of the Turangalîla- Symphonie. Equally attentive to architecture and to detail, they glorify the rich and refined orchestration of the French composer’s vast hymn to love, always on the lookout for unprecedented sonic alchemies. A unique musical and sensory experience.

The Nocturnes and Barcarolles demonstrate Fauré’s art at its most personal, progressing from early lyricism to the elusive, rarefied style of the later works. Marc-André Hamelin’s performances are predictably fine, and combine exceptional subtlety with magisterial keyboard authority.

Yet another unmissable release from Marc-André Hamelin. From the easy-going elegance of Tabby Cat Walk to the high spirits of Eubies Luckey Day (and the altogether wilder antics of Brass Knuckles), William Bolcoms lifelong and affectionate homage toand continuation ofthis archetypal American genre is a guaranteed winner.

The Reger concerto has a formidable reputation—dense, harmonically complex and with far too many notes for the average pianist. Who better then to decipher it than Marc-André Hamelin? In his hands this rarely recorded behemoth reveals both passion and a lyricism so often lost in lesser performances. He is wonderfully partnered by Ilan Volkov and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester who share the pianist’s desire to elucidate an often misunderstood work.

These two works are undoubtedly the greatest of the forgotten concertos we have not previously tackled and have been much requested. Both were written by hugely successful virtuoso pianists who were also composers, and both had a major place in the nineteenth-century repertoire, only falling from favour in the 1920s as modernism found its place in the concert hall.

Fête Galante, a 1999 release featuring soprano Karina Gauvin and pianist Marc-André Hamelin, won numerous awards, and the outstanding performances on this 2011 reissue confirm how well-deserved those honors were. Gauvin has an exceptional voice – clarion-bright, warm, confident, and agile, with a variegated palette of colors – and her effortlessly incisive interpretive skills give depth and life to everything she sings. The distinctiveness and character she brings to these songs show a terrific grasp of the genre of the mélodie, from the late 19th century songs by Fauré and the young Debussy to the mid-20th works by Poulenc, Honegger, and Émile Vuillermoz.

The Busoni concerto, with its five movements, choral finale and a length of over 70 minutes, is surely the most grandiose ever written. But this is no over-ambitious monster; Busoni was one of the greatest pianists the world has known, but he was also a great intellectual with very strong views on art and culture. This work is the masterpiece of his middle years, more of a symphony in the breadth and scope of its ideas, but at the same time almost casually requiring the most formidable technical ability from the soloist. There is no doubt that this is one of music's major neglected masterpieces.

Super-virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin plays two of the lushest products of late Romanticism. The Marx concerto, long awaited by pianophiles the world over, is a first recording. Written in the 1930s, it is perhaps closest in style to Richard Strauss with its gushing melodies and rich orchestration.

The coupling of works by Alkan and Henselt is not as arbitrary as might appear. Born six months apart, both enjoyed long lives and died within eighteen months of each other; both have been entirely overshadowed by their more illustrious contemporaries Liszt and Chopin (to the extent that they have been assigned to the footnotes of musical history), though both had an individual approach to the piano with a style as clearly defined and as idiosyncratic as their two peers; both were recluses, rarely playing their works in public; both were transcendent technicians, exploring the potential of their instrument in ways which were to influence other pianists and composers of piano music; both were eccentrics in their personal habits and lifestyles; both have been almost universally ignored by the majority of concert pianists; and neither of their names is known to the general music-loving public.

The music of C P E Bach makes complex stylistic demands of the performer like little else of its time, the extraordinary drama and intensity tempered by Enlightenment elegance and the influence of the Baroque. Marc-André Hamelin’s performances set new standards in this endlessly absorbing repertoire.

The music of C P E Bach makes complex stylistic demands of the performer like little else of its time, the extraordinary drama and intensity tempered by Enlightenment elegance and the influence of the Baroque. Marc-André Hamelin’s performances set new standards in this endlessly absorbing repertoire.

This album's program represents one phenomenal composer-pianist's homage to another. Marc-André Hamelin has long been a champion of the music of Samuil Feinberg. Hamelin's performances are sensitive to all it's shadows and anxieties while being fully equal to the prodigious technical demands.

If, as Liszt himself dubbed it, Hexaméron is ‘a monster’, it’s a monster which certainly holds no terrors for Marc-André Hamelin, and the encounter between them makes for some thrilling pianism. The remainder of the recital—high-octane transformations of nineteenth-century operatic favourites—is every bit as electrifying, from a musician who never ceases to astonish whatever the repertoire.