Press review
On the album MOZART, Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 23
This second Mozart collaboration between Charles Richard-Hamelin and Les Violons du Roy is a thoroughly joyful listen. The soloist is elegant in two of the composer’s best-loved concertos. His delicate touch draws out a golden, bell-like resonance that contrasts beautifully with the chamber strings, whose period bows ensure the texture is never too rich or Romantic. ★★★★★
BBC Music Magazine
Charlotte Smith
Review of the Beethoven concert at Maison Symphonique de Montréal, September 12, 2020
Charles Richard-Hamelin was the busiest man at the concert. While he is no stranger to Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano (…), the composer’s Concerto No. 4 is a recent addition to his repertoire. Hearing him play it with such depth at the age of 31, one wonders what heights Charles Richard-Hamelin will have reached in 20 or 30 years’ time. The cadenzas of the first and third movements were played with extraordinary commitment, teetering between tumult and tenderness.
La Presse (Montreal)
Emmanuel Bernier, September 13, 2020
Another winning tandem
★★★★ 1/2
After the success of his Chopin concertos, Charles Richard-Hamelin’s new orchestral recording is destined for the same honors. […] At 30, Charles Richard-Hamelin is already a national treasure!
Le Devoir (Montreal)
Christophe Huss, January 31, 2020
On the album Chopin: Ballades & Impromptus, published by Analekta:
The Canadian offers a reading of remarkable formal perfection. His phrasing is at once lilting and finely articulated, and his playing testifies to a beautiful loftiness of vision, as much as to a great attention to detail, treated with subtlety.
Diapason (France)
Jérôme Bastianelli, January 2020
★★★★
The Quebec pianist […] treats them with such intelligence and sensitivity that the score is magnified. This musician, too little known in France, has a perfect mastery of temporality and a great accuracy of intention.
Télérama (France)
Sébastien Porte, January 2020
And this is where, despite illustrious precedents, Charles Richard-Hamelin arouses admiration. There’s not a contrast that isn’t mastered, not a refinement that isn’t precious.
Gang Flow (France)
Anne-Sandrine Di Girolamo, January 10, 2020
But all this would be without counting on the superb artistic performance delivered here by the young Canadian pianist. […] A real “coup de coeur”, then, for this 5th opus recorded for Analekta, and which totally confirms the good impression made on me by his previous disc of Chopin concertos, in the company of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and Kent Nagano. Bravo!
audiophile-magazine.com (France)
Joël Chevassus, December 2019
Charles Richard-Hamelin has carved out an enviable place for himself in a repertoire that is very popular on recordings, thanks to his extreme sensitivity and luminous, well-thought-out playing. He never tries to display gratuitous virtuosity when the palette calls for epic, still less pathos.
on-mag.fr (France)
Jean-Pierre Robert, November 11, 2019
This album is immense.
Le Devoir (Montreal)
Christophe Huss, September 23, 2019
On the album Chopin: Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 with Kent Nagano and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, published by Analekta.
Clearly, this is a successful recording. The poetry of a young artist at the service of a musical thought of incredible refinement.
musiquesenpiste.eu (France)
Ayrton Desimpelaere, August 3, 2019
Richard-Hamelin didn’t miss a beat, giving an exceptional recital in front of an audience of connoisseurs in cathedral-like silence. […] We heard the extent to which this naturally modest artist, moving within a work, can uncover its poetic recesses like a speleologist discovers caverns in a cave. […] It is this refinement in an approach that remains natural that touches the audience.
Le Devoir (Montreal)
Christophe Huss, 2019
Review of the concert at Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, September 6, 2018
The first part of the concert was devoted to a performance by Charles Richard- Hamelin, Second Prize winner of the 2015 Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition. This is his sixth visit to Japan. His subtlety and artistic freshness were still very much in evidence in his playing, especially when he began the major part of the first movement with a thrilling vivacity that reminded me of a teenager fully experiencing her first love. In the third movement, on the other hand, he played the contrasting part, harmoniously mastered between the dynamism of the constant rhythm and the silences subtly present throughout the melody. He’s a genius beyond comparison!
Magazine Ongaku no Tomo (Japan)
Tamiko Ogura
Wonderfully limpid, the recital opened the evening with the intimate Nocturne in C sharp minor. Dazzling and heroic, the popular Polonaise in A flat major swept the hall. Four contrasting ballades, mysterious, lyrical, demonic and sensual, were performed with the utmost care. Richard-Hamelin celebrated Chopin’s music with perfect technique, quality agogics and unfailing agility. Fascinating!
Kronen Zeitung (Austria)
Fred Dorfer, July 23, 2018
Richard-Hamelin’s playing is characterized by beauty of sound, variety of color and a culture of touch that is uncommonly fine and always limpid.
Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)
Harald Eggebrech, June 19, 2018
Second prize winner Charles Richard-Hamelin also received well-deserved applause for his performance of Chopin’s Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58. It was so well executed that it’s impossible not to be amazed that he finished in second place.
The Korea Herald (Korea)
Julie Jackson, February 3, 2016
I’d been waiting for a performance like this since the start of the competition. He is in every way an artist, an extraordinarily mature musician who concentrates on the beauty of Chopin’s works, which he plays with great clarity of vision. He is one of the few competitors who manages to strike a wise balance between the spirit of Chopin and his own individuality, as we heard in his interpretation of the Ballade in A flat major.
Polish Radio 2 (Poland)
Róża Światczyńska, October 7, 2015
This remarkable pianist shapes each phrase with careful attention, then links it to the text one in a way that tells a compelling story from beginning to end. […] If there is one defining characteristic of Richard-Hamelin’s playing it’s how he wields the tools of musical rhetoric – stretching time by slightly slowing down and speeding up, and playing with the silences between notes – to ensure that the narrative tension never goes out of the piece he is playing.
The Star (Toronto)
John Terrauds
The young pianist’s strength, splendour and sense for emphasis were equally captivating as his enormous ability to convey dream, poetry and longing.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich (Deutschland)
Harald Eggebrecht
Charles Richard-Hamelin is clearly a musician-pianist: fluent, multi-faceted and tonally seductive […] Melodic inflection is curvaceous, natural and discreetly sensuous.
BBC Music Magazine
Jeremy Siepmann
Richard-Hamelin has bold, original ideas about the music he plays, the emotional resevoirs to back them up and the technical equipment to convey them without distraction.
