Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin was the only classical musician to play live at the 2001 Grammy Awards Ceremony, a distinction that some of his peers might find dubious and others downright horrifying. It isn't clear what benefit the gig afforded Hamelin in terms of record sales, but in a roundabout sense it fits in with his popularizing approach.
Hamelin records for Hyperion, a record company that's famous for allowing its musicians to do anything they want. The 40-year-old pianist has released more than 20 albums, most of them covering composers you've never heard of but whom Hamelin obviously thinks you should. The reason they're not more popular is that their music tends to be complex; in other words, hard to play.
From his father, an amateur musician, he developed a liking for the difficult early-20th-century composer Leopold Godowsky. He then discovered Ferruccio Busoni, who is remembered as a Bach arranger and a friend of Mahler and little more. Hamelin actually played the Japan premiere of Busoni's monumental Piano Concerto some 90 years after it was written. Hamelin's quirkiest advocacy has been for Charles-Valentin Alkan, a weirdo who wrote seemingly postmodern music in the late Romantic Era and gave his pieces titles like "Funeral March on the Death of a Parrot."