Album: Found objects / sound objects
Piano: Marc-André Hamelin
Label: Hyperion Records
Release: 2025
Works by: Frank Zappa, Salvatore Martirano, John Oswald, John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, Yehudi Wyner, and Hamelin
Recorded: London (2024) and Miami Beach (2013, Cage)
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
Found objects / sound objects is an album about the contemporary piano and the many ways it can be conceived, treated, and heard today. Rather than advancing a single aesthetic, Marc-André Hamelin brings together works that approach the instrument from markedly different angles, tracing a landscape shaped by electronic origins and experimental approaches, alongside structural rigor, lyricism, and personal expression.
The programme opens with a deliberately unexpected choice: Frank Zappa’s Ruth is sleeping. Originally written for the Synclavier, the piece appears here in a solo-piano version that immediately expands the album’s frame of reference. Its complex textures and rhythmic density pose considerable technical challenges, and Hamelin’s performance prioritises clarity and control, transforming a work born outside the acoustic piano into a fully articulated pianistic statement. The opening track thus functions as a point of entry into an album where the piano is repeatedly asked to redefine itself.
A contrasting expressive world emerges in Salvatore Martirano’s Stuck on Stella. Written in 1979, the work moves away from the composer’s earlier serial idiom towards a freer, more tonal language shaped by octatonic scales and quartal harmonies. Hamelin presents the piece as a continuous fantasy, allowing its shifting references and associative flow to unfold without imposing a fixed narrative.
With John Oswald’s Tip, the piano becomes a site of fragmentation and recognition. Built from fleeting melodic allusions that surface and dissolve, the piece plays with the listener’s memory and perception. Hamelin adopts a restrained, attentive approach, preserving the work’s quiet tension and its constant play between familiarity and elusiveness.
John Cage’s The perilous night occupies a pivotal position in the album, both historically and sonically. Written for prepared piano during a period of personal crisis, the work transforms the instrument into a percussive sound object, its six sections reflecting states of anxiety and emotional unrest. Recorded live, the performance retains the music’s starkness and its refusal of resolution, underscoring Cage’s radical rethinking of what piano music could be.
Structural rigor comes to the foreground in Stefan Wolpe’s Passacaglia, a work constructed from a simple sequence of expanding intervals and a limited number of derived series. From this tightly controlled material, Wolpe builds a large-scale, cumulative form of considerable complexity.
The album’s lyrical centre is provided by Yehudi Wyner’s Refrain. Its continuously evolving material and subtle harmonic shifts create a sense of organic flow, with ideas rarely returning in identical form. Written by a composer who is also a distinguished pianist, the piece is conceived with an intimate understanding of the instrument, offering a moment of relative repose within the programme’s broader landscape.
The closing work, Hamelin’s own Hexensabbat, places the pianist-composer directly within the album’s conceptual framework. Drawing on a sketch from his student years and reworked with a mature compositional voice, the piece acknowledges historical echoes—most notably Berlioz—while asserting a personal idiom. Its inclusion reinforces the idea of the album as a curated collection shaped by long-term engagement with the repertoire rather than by a purely theoretical concept.
One of the album’s defining features is the booklet essay, written by Hamelin himself. His explanations are almost as engaging as the music they accompany, offering lucid and often personal reflections on each work’s origins, influences, and aesthetic aims without prescribing how the listener should respond. In an interview given to Ludwig Van Toronto, Hamelin has noted that the programme grew out of works performed over recent seasons, further situating Found objects / sound objects as a snapshot of a living, evolving repertoire.
Taken as a whole, the album offers a thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration of the piano’s contemporary possibilities, guided by an artist whose technical authority consistently serves musical understanding rather than display.
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