Marc-André Hamelin was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 5 September 1961, and began playing the piano at the age of five. His father, a pharmacist and amateur pianist, introduced him in childhood to the music of Charles-Valentin Alkan, Leopold Godowsky and Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, composers who remained central to his work thereafter.

He studied at the École de musique Vincent-d’Indy in Montreal with Yvonne Hubert, and then at Temple University in Philadelphia with Harvey Wedeen. In 1985 he won the Carnegie Hall International Competition for American Music, and he gave his Carnegie Hall recital debut in 1988. The Virginia Parker Prize followed in 1989.

His recording career has been bound up with the Hyperion label, for which he has set down a wide range of composers. He is also a composer in his own right: his works include the 12 Études in All The Minor Keys, completed in 2009 and published by C. F. Peters, a cycle titled Con Intimissimo Sentimento, pieces written for player piano, and music for trumpet and other instruments. He holds the rank of Officer of the Order of Canada and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec. He has received eleven Grammy nominations and has won seven Juno Awards, most recently in 2012 for Classical Album of the Year, and his Godowsky recording took the Gramophone Instrumental Award in 2000.

Hamelin’s reputation rests on the combination of a transcendental technique with an appetite for repertoire other pianists leave alone. He is associated above all with the pianist-composers and with lesser-known figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Godowsky, Alkan, Sorabji, Scriabin, Liszt, Medtner and Rzewski among them — and his Hyperion discography has done much to bring that music into general circulation.

His Albéniz set, issued by Hyperion in April 2005 as CDA67476/7, surveys the late piano music complete: Iberia in its four books, together with La vega, España: Souvenirs, Yvonne en visite! and Navarra in the completion by William Bolcom. It marked the entry of a non-Spanish pianist into a repertoire long held by Spanish players, and was received as a benchmark on both technical and interpretive grounds. Hyperion’s release page for the set cites Gramophone calling it “the most immaculate, effortless and refined of all Iberias” and the Sunday Times “now the recording of choice”; neither review could be confirmed with the publication itself.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc-Andr%C3%A9_Hamelin
https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA67476%2F7