Take it from New York’s top dogs of classical-music criticism. Alex Ross, of The New Yorker, prophesied a quarter century ago that Marc-André Hamelin’s “legend will grow.” A decade later, Ross celebrated the Canadian pianist’s “monstrously brilliant technique and his questing, deep-thinking approach.” In 2015, Zachary Woolfe singled out Hamelin’s “preternatural clarity and control, qualities that in him don’t preclude sensitivity and even poetry.” Yet as Hamelin’s immense discography indicates, showboating is not what he’s about. Having road-tested Beethoven’s all-but-mythic “Hammerklavier” Sonata 30 years ago, he retired it for 30 years, finally releasing a magisterial recording in October of this year. An intrepid explorer, he’s far likelier to lose himself in the byways of Alkan or Medtner or Szymanowski than the box-office crowd-pleasers. Not surprisingly, George Gershwin’s whizbang Rhapsody in Blue has rarely if ever appeared in Hamelin’s datebook. Yet there he is, doing unlikely solo honors in this crowd-pleaser par excellence with the aristocratic Cleveland Symphony, led by David Robertson. Count on it: this will be something. Other composers on the bill: Ellington and Copland. —Matthew Gurewitsch