While still a student at the Paris Conservatoire in 1833, the 19-year-old Alkan made the first of two mysterious visits to London. His return early the following year coincided with a publication by Cocks & Son of variations on arias from operas by Donizetti and Bellini, Variations quasi-faintaisie sur une barcarolle napolitaine, the Concerto da camera No. 2, and the Rondeau chromatique. Appearing in No. 25 of the Pianist's Journal, the Rondeau chromatique carries a dedication to the "Societé des Enfans [sic] d'Apollon"—not otherwise identified—and a notice that it had been performed at its annual concert. By Alkan? Playing about eight minutes, an ominous introduction yields to a Bellinian cantilena that is primly yet effusively varied in scintillant passage work, and whose alternating episodes suggest a transcription of an operatic scene by one of the bel canto masters, though the piano removes it to a salon fare demesne of airheaded giddiness that Liszt's Grand Galop chromatique was to tap with phenomenal success four years later. In both, the chromaticism is purely ornamental. Alkan's Paris publisher Richault misleadingly assigned the Rondeau chromatique's Op. 12 to his issue of the Improvisations (3) dans le style brilliant—one of the earliest of several confusions bedeviling the Alkan catalog.

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