Alkan's etudes—in particular the Op. 39 Minor-Key Etudes—are the preserve of pianistic supermen. It is at once their bane and their glory that only when animated by the few pianistic wizards of each generation—Busoni, Petri, John Ogdon, Marc-André Hamelin—do their unique qualities come into focus. For the adventure of the Minor-Key Etudes is to achieve by means of 10 fingers on a keyboard a power and magnificence rivaling that of a full orchestra, and to do so, moreover, within the constraints of the exceedingly sec, rhythmically precise style sévère. Four of the Etudes comprise a substantial symphony in which the formal procedures of Classical sonata form are knowingly wrought by an eminently Gothic sensibility, including a second-movement "Marche funèbre," which evokes funeral marches by Beethoven, Berlioz, and Chopin. Three more etudes make a concerto in which alternations of "solo" and "tutti" are cunningly suggested. Playing nearly 30 minutes, and wrought in a veritable fury of invention, the concerto's first movement is arguably the most resplendent pianistic creation of the nineteenth century. Technical matters explored in previous etudes are subsumed in the momentum of the symphony and the concerto, as well as in that of the penultimate number, an ambitious ouverture, as studies in the projection of vast and subtly inwrought designs embracing a colossal range of expression. Examples of this projection are the concerto's tensely brooding second-movement nocturne, and the mordant, skirling majesty of its third movement polonaise. Capping the Minor-Key Etudes, the 25 racily succinct variations of "Le Festin d'Ésope" ("Aesop's feast") index the technical keys to Alkan's unique pianistic universe as they highlight his often puzzling vein of bizarre humor. The set was published in 1857, not quite a decade after the Major-Key Etudes and six years after Liszt's final recension of his Transcendental Etudes, to which the Minor-Key Etudes are, in a sense, a reply. Nothing in Liszt's pianistic oeuvre, and only the first movement of his Faust Symphony, approaches the seemingly sprawling but tightly integrated and triumphantly powerful architecture of Alkan's concerto's first movement. A consummate virtuoso and peer of Chopin and Liszt, Alkan seems to have performed only a drastically cut version of this movement on a single occasion in 1876, followed by the "Marche funèbre" and misleadingly titled Minuet ("a real Hexen minuett, complete with broomsticks," Raymond Lewenthal called it) from the symphony. Thus, it was left for Egon Petri, to give the symphony and concerto their proper premieres in a series of BBC commemorative concerts of 1938 and 1939, a half century after Alkan's death.

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1.Comme le vent: Prestissimamente in A-

Just as Liszt's Études d'exécution transcendante begins with a presto Preludio of cascading arpeggios, scorrevole passagework, punched-out chords, and prominent trills—which, in two packed pages, strut the oft-remarked character of limbering the hands or testing the instrument—Alkan's Études (12) dans les tons mineurs opens with the one-upping prestissamamente "Comme le vent" (not to be confused with the campy "Le Vent" from the early Op. 15 Souvenirs (3), morceaux dans le genre pathétique) whose demands must challenge all but those with pianistic super powers. As Alkan's chief chronicler and one of his most persuasive interpreters Ronald Smith remarked, "like the wind it goes, set at a hair-raising speed of 160 2/16 bars to the minute, or 16 notes to the second, [it is] a kind of nightmare tarantella." The first, nearly impossible version of Liszt's Études d'exécution transcendante took shape in the late 1830s, very likely in response to Alkan's contemporary early etudes, Opp. 12, 13, 15, and 16, in which the exploration of a specific technical difficulty has been swept aside for a canvas of often eldritch allusiveness presupposing an omnicompetent technique capable of encompassing every conceivable demand. Alkan's Études (12) dans les tons majeurs, Op. 35, published by Brandus in 1848, continued this gambit with greater refinement and greater audacity. Liszt, during the same years, was refashioning his etudes, paring their unplayable writing to the grandiose effectiveness of their final 1851 version. There can be no doubt that both composers, and sometime friends, shared a tacit rivalry whose statement-and-response pattern is often revealing. Where Liszt's Preludio is sketch-like, brief, and a grandiose gesture, "Comme le vent" is an essay in Alkan's obsessive vein. A relentless stream of thirty-second notes in triplet pattern of two to the bar moves from one hand to the other, sometimes appearing in both to outline two subjects in a brief but torrential development and sudden recapitulation suggesting a compact sonata first movement. The startled listener, however, is less likely to notice such formal ingenuities in their coruscating perpetual motion rush rather than the shifting, shimmering textures laced with frantic drama. Alkan's formal tightness stands in contrast to unconstrained Lisztian abundance and foreshadows the stupendous architecture of the Symphonies No. 4-7 and the solo concerto (Nos. 8-10) forming the bulk of the Études (12) dans les tons mineurs and lifting Alkan above the enigmatic curiosity suggested by his posthumous reputation to confirm his place among the greatest of the Romantic composers.

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2.En rythme molossique: Risoluto in D-

When Ezra Pound noted that "Technique is the test of a man's sincerity," he was making explicit what former ages had taken for granted. Pound was speaking of poetic technique—what in musical terms would be called compositional craft—and speaking to modernism's preoccupation with new technical means. Alkan can often seem proto-modern in his obsessive fashioning of new challenges at the keyboard and his exploration of unsuspected compositional resources. In L'Incendie au village voisin, for instance, he writes chords of five adjacent notes and he may be calling for fingers rather than fists, but the effect is a tone cluster, whose discovery is usually attributed to Henry Cowell some 66 years later. Alkan's toyings with a time of five range from stately re-creations of the Basque zorzico to the lilting Andando octave study concluding the Op. 35 Études dans les tons majeurs. For the second of his Études dans les tons mineurs, Op. 39, En rhythme molossique, his reference to the arcane reaches of ancient Greek prosody—molossus is a foot of three long syllables—is as curious as his translation of it into an unrelenting 6/4 pattern of quarter notes followed by four eighth notes. Such a straitjacket would have crushed the life from a lesser composer, but Alkan's invention thrives in constraint. A big-boned rondo, realized in textures ranging from massive chords and octave salvos to purling gossamer spread over the keyboard's extremities, the successive episodes generate a monumental, inexorable momentum limned in plangent melodic oddments that paradoxically attain their greatest compression with a most gracious resolution in a recapitulation deftly combining the two preceding variations before a long, quiet coda in which the "molossic" beat sinks to the lowest bass register as the filigree spins itself out in an exquisite smorzando. It ends, after so much major blitheness, with three enigmatically minor chords. Busoni included En rhythme molossique in his concerts from 1901, for which he was indignantly abused by the Berlin critics. As with so much of Alkan's finest work, it is not the outsized virtuoso demands that keep the piece from being heard, but its bizarre grandeur, at once captivating and disturbing. In the series of Études (12), its monumentality provides a foil for the frantic fleetness of the opening "Comme le vent" and sets the stage, so to speak, for the obligatory Romantic essay in deviltry, the "Scherzo-diabolico." It was published in 1857.

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3.Scherzo diabolico: Prestissimo in G-

The third of Alkan's Études (12) dans le tons mineurs, the Scherzo-diabolico, is the least ambitious—though not the least demanding—of the Op. 39 set. It is diabolism tongue-in-cheek and classically proportioned where, say, Liszt's Mephistophelean gestures would swell into colossal mockery in the final movement of Eine Faust Symphonie and erotically tinged rhapsody in Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke. And where Berlioz's deviltry hovers between the grotesquery of the "Witches' Sabbath" of the Symphonie fantastique and the exquisiteness of Mephistopheles' "Voici les roses" in La Damnation de Faust, Alkan's is possessed by an athletic prestissimo prankishness, pungently grand and rising to a noble declaration in its central section with the opening reprised in a masterstroke ppp whisper. It is the world of "Les Diablotins" (imps, little devils) and the Scherzetto (Nos. 45 and 47, respectively, of the Esquisses) writ large, a world inhabited by "Jewish goblins" (as Raymond Lewenthal remarked of the latter piece), rife with bizarre apparitions and strange mischance. Only in the "Quasi-Faust" movement of the Grande Sonate did Alkan rival Berlioz and Liszt in his prehension of the diabolical titanic struggle between good and evil rather than the lingering Luciferian glamor they indulged. But if the glitter of the Scherzo-diabolico incorporates a large measure of fastidious primness in its swagger, it is nonetheless a prime document of Romanticism's fascination with figures of evil and provides a moment of relative levity between the inexorable momentum of En rhythme molossique and the stormy involvement of the Symphonie's first movement, the beginning of the ascent to the succeeding etudes' ever-richer, more demanding utterance. By the time of its publication by Richault in 1857, Alkan had been retired from public performance for over a dozen years and, without his advocacy and the example of the rhythmically precise, sec, style sévère, required to animate this piece, it fell stillborn from the press.

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11.Overture

Alkan's Études dans les tons majeurs, Op. 35, and the stupendous Études dans les tons mineurs, Op. 39, are dedicated to Belgian historian, theoretician, and critic François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871), whom he met as a student prodigy—Berlioz encountered him at about the same time—in the halls of the Paris Conservatoire where Fétis taught counterpoint and fugue from 1821. Fétis' reviews show him to have taken an appreciative interest in Alkan from his youth. Fétis concludes a notice of the Marche funèbre, the Marche triomphale, and the Préludes (25) in the Revue et Gazette musicale for July 25, 1847, with the admonition, "An artist owes it to himself, his time and his century to allow his faculties full free rein. God does not grant these gifts without obligation." Alkan had already been absent from the concert hall for three years and would not appear again publicly until 1873. He answered Fétis on the day the review appeared, apprising him of a number of compositions held back. "They include a long sonata, a large scale scherzo, an overture for piano and studies, some of which are fashioned on a rather large scale," works, Alkan promised, "whose development is quite unlike those you have so kindly described." The Grande Sonate would be published by Brandus the following year. But the overture would not see print until Richault's issue of the minor key etudes in 1857. Playing around 15 minutes, the Overture is a big-boned piece that immediately announces its symphonic ambitions in throbbing maestoso chords. The rich succession of themes, all of large stamp, prompted Sorabji to note the Overture as "A fine example of Alkan's orchestral pianistic style; here again crop up Beethoven-like turns of thought and expression." Like late Beethoven, spacious design coupled with a terse musical argument may discourage the casual listener. Even Ronald Smith, one of Alkan's most persuasive interpreters, could write, "I must admit that I had little inkling of the work's extraordinary power and originality until I had penetrated its technical armour-plating to tap the darkly turbulent undercurrents that lie locked within."

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12.Le festin d'Esope: Allegretto senza licenza quintunque in E-

While not as famous as his contemporary, Franz Liszt (with whom he is often compared), French composer and pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan was a fascinating and puzzling character. Well known in Parisian artistic circles that included the likes of George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo, Alkan was given to episodes of reclusion. Disappointed by various events in his life, Alkan would retreat, then reappear to publish a new piece or present a series of concerts. One can assume that he was a remarkable piano virtuoso himself. Not for the faint of heart, many of his pieces are some of the most demanding in the repertory.

Le festin d'Esope is from of a group of 12 Etudes, Op. 39. The principal melody (very much like a child's nursery song) goes through every permutation possible. Like each course in Aesop's sumptuous, yet monotonous banquet of tongue, every "musical course", or variation, is different: from dark and ominous to light and playful. While very much a showpiece of pianistic virtuosity, it is also a supreme example of the art of theme and variations. Alkan displays a rarely seen, but engaging sense of humor. For a more serious side of Alkan explore Grande Sonate "Les Quatre Ages", Op. 33 and the monumental Sonatine, Op. 61.



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