Marc-André Hamelin on Cover of Gramophone!

Cover Photo Credits: Ben Ealovega

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin recently spoke with Michelle Assay from Gramophone for the cover story of the November 2025 issue. Together, they discussed the process and inspiration behind Hamelin’s latest album, Found Objects / Sound Objects, which includes works by Cage, Marirano, Wolpe, Oswald, Wyner, and even Hamelin himself. Hamelin wanted “a means to put together some repertoire that would have been very difficult, or even impossible, to inject into other projects,” he says. This idea of fragmentation is most apparent in John Oswald’s Tip, a 2021 Hamelin-commissioned piece, which injects upwards of 40 musical clippings from a variety of genres from classical to jazz to pop. Nonetheless, Hamlin’s goal remains the same: “It’s always about sharing with the audience,” he says. “It’s my fantasy that [music] could really express itself semantically, with chapters, paragraphs, sentences, punctuation. Not to mention, of course, ideas. I have this fantasy that whatever I play, in whatever way I play it, could be understood as a narrative, a pure narrative.”

Found Objects / Sound Objects closes with Hamelin’s own composition Hexansabbat, commissioned for Le Piano Symphonique festival in Lucerne and premiered by Yoav Levanon in 2024. Jed Distler, who reviewed the album in the same issue for Gramophone, comments: “Imagine the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique’s stark raving mad finale and Liszt’s Scherzo und Marsch first paired together, then chopped to bits, and then radically reharmonised to 21st-century specifications, with more than a few hints of Carl Stalling’s Warner Brothers cartoon soundtracks tossed into the mix.” 

Distler concludes: “Found Objects / Sound Objects may be Hamelin’s most uncompromising, most personal and most interesting release to date.”

Read the full piece here.

Stream the album here.

Photo Credits: Ben Ealovega