J'étais endormie, mais mon coeur veillait, prelude for piano in Gb (Préludes dans tous les tons No.13), Op.31, No.13

"I sleep, but my heart waketh," declares the lover of the biblical Song of Solomon, continuing, "it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night." Alkan enveloped that sentiment in one of his most charming but recondite miniatures, a seductive lullaby unfolding in a curiously caressing quintuple melody over a gently rocking tonic-dominant shift, to hypnotic effect, as the tune takes a pleading turn to daringly end unresolved. Impossible to date precisely, J'étais endormie almost certainly comes from the mid-1840s during Alkan's period of "rhythmic research" (as his editor Georges Beck termed it) and preoccupation with a time of five. The allusion to dew—"my head is filled with dew"—recalls the epigraph of the Adagio of Alkan's Sonate de Concert for cello and piano, from Micah 5:7 ("As a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass, that tarrieth not for man..."), where it is a synonym for the Jewish dispersion. The latter is a mystical moment, the former a visionary but worldly one, and both feature unusual rhythmic anomalies. Busoni thought well enough of J'étais endormie to include this small but strangely shimmering masterpiece in his programs from 1902, and it is, today, among the most frequently programmed of Alkan's smaller pieces. It was published as one of the Préludes (25), Op. 31, by Brandus in 1847 as a collection featuring several prayers, a rendering of Psalm 150, and that other overt reminder of Alkan's Jewishness, the Ancienne mélodie de la synogogue.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide

Suite No.3 - 21.Doucement

The English pianist, scholar, and champion of Alkan's music Ronald Smith noted of Doucement that it "is as relaxed and carefree as a child day-dreaming in its swing," suggested by its lazily swaying motion in Alkan's favorite 6/8. A single page, a few seconds of play—even with its repeat—and a pedal-held smorzando e rallentando fadeout bring listeners disarmingly face-to-face with a vein of genuine naïveté, an unaffected, undistorted glimpse of childhood similar to such things as Grâces, the poignant backward look of Ressouvenir, or the lullaby Fais dodo (Nos. 19, 13, and 33 of the Motifs (48), esquisses, Op. 63). Doucement's utter simplicity and drowsy charm are eminently suitable for beginning piano students.

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