The Esquisses, though sketch-like in their brevity—some of the most remarkable playing rather less than a minute—possess a suggestive power akin to the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld or the more concisely telling aphorisms of Nietzsche. Published in 1861, and running twice through all the major and minor keys, a number of these pieces undoubtedly date back a decade or more but catch Alkan at his most old-masterly-sly, pithy, strange, and strangely moving, brisk, crisp, brilliant. As opposed to the Preludes, Op. 31, Alkan has taken care to set them out with an ear, so to speak, to variety and contrast, "the 'texture' of the gnarled oak-bark next to the silkiness of a lily-petal" noted by the composer and critic, Bernard van Dieren. For instance, the snarling "Increpatio" ("rebuke"), rising in rhetorical wrath to end on the aural equivalent of a slammed door, is followed by the gossamer arpeggios of "Les Soupirs" ("sighs") weaving in but a few seconds a tissue of ineffable nostalgia. Commentators have been assiduous in pinpointing anticipations of Modern composers in the Esquisses—Prokofiev (in Musique militaire), Mahler (Le Frisson, Scherzetto), Ives and Cowell (in Diablotins, where acciaccaturas derived from the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti sound very much like tone clusters). Of "Les Soupirs," Alkan's foremost expositor, Raymond Lewenthal, writes that "These delicious sighs waft over the years that bridge the gap between Schumann and Debussy." Such observations touch the essential paradox that while Alkan is conservative—straitlaced, even—in outlook, and his music, analyzed academically, is almost always explainable in terms of the tried-and-true, his aural imagination, or sheer mastery of sound, remained unfettered to soar aloft in fantastic realms. Such things as "La Vision" or the "Barcarollette" inhabit an eerie psychic twilight, while others, such as the "Rigaudon" or "Petite Marche villageoise" or the inexpressibly comic "L'Homme aux sabots" ("man in clogs"), evoke rustic scenes with a sophisticated primitivism which looks forward to Chabrier. Side by side, one finds nods to the "genre ancien"—in a "Petite air" and the "Tutti de concerto" (reminding us that Alkan knew intimately the music of the clavecinistes)—and small lurid gems drawn from a rich vein of the grotesque ("Morituri te salutant"—"we who are about to die salute you"), bizarre ("Inflexibilité,"), and eldritch ("Les Cloches"—"bells" or "Délire"—"frenzy"). There are even a couple of lullabies—"'Fais dodo'" and "En Songe." And while Alkan's penchant for parody may crop up anywhere, it comes frankly fo forward in "Début de quatuor" and in his backhanded 'homages' to Mozart ("Minuettino") and Mendelssohn ("Notturnino—innamorato"), the former essaying "Vedrai carino," from Don Giovanni, in C sharp minor, set off by a giddy trio in the relative major, the latter a virtual recomposition of the "Venetian Gondola Song," Op. 30, No. 6, from the Songs Without Words. Amid so much tongue-in-cheek leg-pulling, the haltingly hilarious dialogue of rival philosophers, "Héraclite et Démocrite," deserves mention by itself. Technical concerns, pianistic and compositional, are addressed in "Le Staccatissimo," "Le Legatissimo," and a "Fuguette" which manages to run an entire gamut of contrapuntal tropes in just a bit over a minute—musically as gratifying as they are difficult to get fluently beneath the fingers. Alkan scholar and pianist Ronald Smith thought the worldly-wise "Le Premier Billet doux" ("the first love letter"), a mere twenty bars, "the absolute masterpiece among the lyrical Esquisses . . . ." Finally, a number of pieces address us, without double entendres, by their joie de vivre, elegance, and poetry—"Contredanse," "Grâces," or the "Petit Air dolent." In sum, a richly annotated musical index to the consistently astounding quirks of the Alkanistic quiddity.

© All Music Guide

Les diablotins, for piano in Eb (Motifs 4/45), Op.63, No.4/45

Published by Richault in 1861—the same year as the misleadlingly titled Sonatine—the Esquisses make a constantly startling index to Alkan's suavest fantasy and his most peccant humor. Drawn from the latter, Les diablotins (imps, little devils) captures the imagination with a pungent immediacy quite unlike any of those other great Romantic evocations of the creatures of air, such as the Arimanes of Schumann's Manfred, the gossamer Sylphs of Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, Liszt's Feux-follets, or the Gnomes of his Gnomenreigen. The only comparable vignette, perhaps, is Alkan's own Esprits follets from Book 3 of Chants, Op. 65. Les diablotins opens with strident fanfares, fortissimo et sonore, that are in unison and then in thirds, and finally in vehemently exasperated chords spanning the keyboard. This was met with the aural equivalent of "raspberries" (or Bronx cheers), which led Raymond Lewenthal and Ronald Smith, the two superlative writers and pianists responsible for the 1960s Alkan revival, to invoke the name of experimental modernist Henry Cowell. "These tone clusters," Lewenthal noted, "can easily enough be explained as triads with single and double acciaccaturas, such as terrified editors of Scarlatti so much for a century and a half that they expurgated them as if they were four-letter Anglo-Saxon words...." Alkan included Scarlatti in his concert programs throughout his reluctant virtuoso career, though he was sufficiently audacious to have hit upon this grating device without prompting and never shied away from the most grinding dissonances (as in the Allegramente of the Sonatine), provided they arose through pure musical logic. Momentarily quelled, the imps—their tone clusters muted—parade a stifled strut until a chorale-like voice from the choir, so to speak, marked Quasi-Santo, is greeted derisively. Another, Quasi-Santa, is an attempt at exorcism tentatively met before it provokes an animated fracas and sudden disappearance. Though the Esquisses are a compilation that must have been years in the making, and the precise dating of Alkan's compositions is often impossible, it is difficult to reconcile the (what else!) impish humor of Les diablotins with the self-portrait that emerges in letters from the early 1860s to his friend, Ferdinand Hiller, of a cranky, dyspeptic, frail old man. Alkan would turn 48 in the year of Les diablotins' publication!

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi