While the bulk of Alkan's music is for solo piano—albeit, a piano often deployed with a power and eloquence rivaling that of an orchestra—several concertante, vocal, and chamber works loom to reveal an omnicompetent musician, at once masterly and arrestingly original. Such lone masterpieces as the Concerti da camera, the brief, brilliant Pas redoublé for wind band, or the comic Marcia funebre sulla morte d'un Papagallo makes one regret the promise of Alkan's lost orchestral symphony or the suggestion that the six measures of a string quartet, jotted in a friend's album, betoken a complete work. Alkan's three extant chamber works—each strikingly different and wholly unlike any others—seem to emanate from a strange, remote country of the soul, marked by a courtly eighteenth century primness set in a Watteau landscape populated by bizarre characters engaged in a perpetual harlequinade. The first of these, the Duo concertant for piano and violin, is peculiarly revealing of an enigma. By 1840, its year of composition, Alkan was about to turn 27 and had established himself as one of the most formidable pianists before the public, a friend and rival of Liszt's, had published the Morceaux (3) dans le genre pathétique (dedicated to Liszt and savaged by Schumann as "false, unnatural art"), and suffered a personal calamity. (He was rumored to have had an affair with one of his married pupils that eventuated in the birth of a son, Elie Miriam Delaborde, which drove him into his first extended period of retirement.) The Duo concertant is a product of this period of self-imposed obscurity. The opening movement, "Assez animé," marked Avec désespoir, ruminatively begins to rise, with its second subject, into an eloquent lamentation becoming more effusive and clamorous in the course of a richly compact development, to end with yearning hopefulness. The Lentement middle movement, which Alkan frankly titled "L'Enfer" (Hell), pits the violin's pathetic pleas against implacable pronouncements from the piano, only partially relieved by a central évangéliquement episode rife with stifled longing that is soon banished by the return of the opening to dash all hope with crushing finality. With the Finale, to be played Aussi vite que possible, the dialogue of the previous movements takes frantic aspiring flight to end, despite a clutch of brilliant virtuoso flourishes, in doubtful triumph. The work is dedicated to Chrétien Urhan, the viola soloist of the 1834 premiere of Berlioz's Harold en Italie.

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