Thanks for the suggestions. I will have a look for Ponti since, at his best, he could be very exciting with plenty of colour. But he did rather a lot of recordings, and some sound just rather dull, so I hope this isn't one of them. I got hold of lots of live material from Italian concerts from the 70s and early 80s recently, and some of that is impressive. Lots of Liszt, by the way.

I meant to mention this ages ago, but tonybob's explanation of the username increpatio on another thread has just reminded me, by alerting me once more to how ignorant I am of Alkan.

I find this whole business very odd, btw. I don't remember anyone mentioning him to me at school or at university - I first remember coming across the name when I worked in a CD shop, but I assumed he was a 'marginal' figure, like Sorabji or someone ... But then the programme notes to Jonathan P's recital the other week described him as one of the C19th's leading piano composers alongside Chopin and Liszt, as if that were now established opinion. Is this a recent canonisation, or did I somehow manage to miss out something central from my early musical education? Or is he still a marginal figure after all, and were those programme notes biased?

Alkan's reputation has not developed as well, easily or early as those of his almost exact contemporaries Chopin and Liszt; the very fact that, in spite of his light being made continuously to burn by a handful of people over the years since his death such as the pianists Busoni, Isidor Philipp, the young Arrau (occasionally) and Petri and a certain writer whose name I won't mention, his work did not really come to more general public attention until the 1960s (at the hands of Ogdon, Smith and Lewenthal in the main) has meant that he was indeed long regarded as a kind of marginal figure and some of this attitude still remains today. This situation is in some ways not unakin to that of Busoni, who attracted an immense respect that for many years seemed quite disproportionate to his representations in the concert halls and opera houses - and even (in a differen sense) to that of Rakhmaninov, who until some 30 or so years ago tended to "enjoy" household name status based upon general familiarity with but a tiny handful of his works. During his own lifetime, Alkan's obsessive shyness and reclusivity had likewise done little to assist his public profile in the way, for example, that Liszt's public activities in his early and middle life did for him. The end result is that sometimes awkward phenomenon of a performing tradition getting going only long after the death of the composer and, in this respect, his situation is to some extent analgous to that of Godowsky, whose music has become far better known during the last quarter century or so than ever it was previously.

Like you, I find his work very interesting but, unlike you, I would accord him a position in the first rank, since he (a) did much to develop the expressive possibilities of the piano contemporarily with, but very differently from, Liszt, (b) stood somewhat aside from the Romantic movement while at the same time being a part of it and (c) hurled his lance from time to time into the future, again as Liszt did towards the end of his life. There is a powerful fearlessness that informs much of his best work yet, at the same time, he rarely allows this to get out of control and permit his work to break the bounds of practical possibility, its sometimes extreme technical challenges notwithstanding (perhaps one case where he might be said to have made something of an exception here is the second of the Trois Grandes Études, Op. 76 - the one for right hand alone). At the time of its compostion, his cello sonata was arguably one of the most ambitious and powerful works for the medium since the Op. 102 sonatas of Beethoven.

Liszt explored far more media than Alkan did, of course - in this respect Alkan is more akin to Chopin in concentrating principally on music for his own instrument. All three knew one another (and I believe that Liszt is supposed to have sat next to Chopin at Alkan's première of his own 25 Préludes), although the common ground between Alkan and Chopin more or less ends there; there may have been a little cross-fertilisation of ideas between Alkan and Chopin (Ronald Smith writes a little about this) but the differences of temperament and resulting music far outweigh any similarities.

Just me 'umble opinion...

Best,

Alistair

Thanks for reminding me of this! Yes, one may well wonder that - just as one might be tempted to wonder what the young Boulez thought about Alkan (Boulez was once quite an accomplished pianist, I believe - not that I've ever heard him play and he's not played the piano in public for many years now, I think); he evidently has a high regard for Chopin, so...

Whether one can more effectively contribute towards the establishment of "mainstream" status for any under-represented composer by programming his/her work along with works by more established composers or by presenting it on its own with a view to getting it to stand proudly on its own two feet is hard to say with certainty and would surely vary in any case from composer to composer and occasion to occasion.

From the purely pianistic point of view, I would venture to suggest that a pianist who can play all the Alkan and Chopin/Godowsky studies as they should be played is quite likely to be capable of playing most piano music worthy of the effort, but there is far more of interest in Alkan than just pianistic considerations (for me, at any rate); I found, for example, that my initial fascination for Chopin was not at all about his relationship with the piano but about textures, harmonic progressions, counterpoint (especially in the later works), form and so on, as well as the notion of a particularly individual voice and approach (of course I soon cottoned on to the pianistic side of things - it would surely have been idiotically short-sighted of me not to! - but that was not, as I say, the first impetus that made me want to listen to as much of his music as i could).

Given the respect in which Alkan was apparently held during his lifetime by such luminaries as Chopin and Liszt, I would be interested to know what other members might think about the extent to which his almost obsessive shying away from anything that might amount to publicity brought about a stunting of the development of his reputation in a way that never happened to Chopin or Liszt - or indeed any other thoughts about what it was that kept Alkan largely in the shadows for so very long.

Best,

Alistair

Alkan's music did not begin to be widely appreciated in this country before recordings were easily available in the 1970s. Not really surprising perhaps - Ives was commonly regarded as a "crank" until the late 1960s and Mahler was not much known in England until a few years before that: both composers are now pretty much accepted as masters of their time, if not their century - or at least I would hope they are. That Alkan has not yet achieved their status may be (partly ?) due to most of his works being for solo piano. I've no idea to what extent conservatoire teaching furthers Alkan's cause - probably not as much as it should, I suspect. His works still don't appear that often on concert programmes - well, not to the extent that those of Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Brahms do - and they're the composers with whom Alkan needs to be put alongside for a proper assessment of mid-late 19th century piano music. [That's not personal whim either - I'm not a great fan of either Schumann or Brahms . . .]

How about this ?
Bernard van Dieren, in Down among the dead men writes as follows: - "When Busoni, in his early Berlin years, presented a compendium of piano-literature, Alkan was violently abused by all critics. Liszt had been the bugbear of the Berlin fraternity. It vetoed French music, French piano music especially, on principle . . . even then the hostility shown was remarkable . . . Whether the rabid prejudice that rears its ugly head here had echoed as far as London I have no means of telling, but it is a fact that on the few occasions when Busoni or Egon Petri included any Alkan in their programmes there, critics almost unanimously, and with similar vehemance, denounced the composer and his interpreters".

I don't think that's an eccentric view. (Van Dieren, like Sorabji, was very much an Alkan supporter, by the way). I've read elsewhere of what almost amounts to a "campaign" against Alkan. This kind of thing still happens.

One problem with Alkan is that we don't have easy access to his oeuvre in the way that we do with Chopin, Brahms, Schumann (to a certain extent) and Liszt (to a lesser extent, although thanks to Leslie Howard we know what there is out there.) I got to know what Ronald Smith recorded in the 70s, Lewenthal a bit earlier (and edited in his Schirmer volume) and more recently bits and pieces by Ringiessen, Laurent Martin, Hamelin and others. But I don't yet have a sense in my mind of where various pieces fit in his output or indeed what else might be out there. And it isn't until that happens (ie a decent collected edition) that any meaningful discussion of his work can really happen.

Another problem is that he doesn't really feel like a French composer (whatever one of those is). He ploughed his own - solitary - furrow. If he reminds me of anyone it is more often a sort of missing link between Schubert and Mahler, with a bit of the weirder Liszt (or maybe even Berlioz, that other non-French Frenchman) thrown in - compare Quasi-Faust with the Dante Sonata for example. I was absolutely bowled over by the pieces that appeared on Hamelin's Hyperion disc with the Symphony: Salut, cendre du pauvre! Op 45, Alleluia Op 25, Super flumina Babylonis Op 52 (Paraphrase du Psaume 137), and Souvenirs: Trois Morceaux dans le genre pathétique Op 15. They are the product of - at the very least - a truly original mind. (Here's a thought - a precursor of Satie???) Maybe those pieces don't have Chopin's simultaneous control over all the musical elements - but then, neither do Liszt or Schumann, or at least only rarely (Brahms probably does, as a matter of course, but I have never warmed enough to Brahms to want to spend much time with him); I'm not quite sure what qualities Liszt or Schumann have that place them in a position superior to that of Alkan - except that on the whole we are more familiar with their respective languages and forgive them more if we like them. I love both of those composers but often find myself maddened and frustrated by what they don't quite bring off - Schumann's circularity, Liszt's all too frequent recourse to - well, I was going to write vulgarity, but I suppose I should temper that and call it "extravagance". But if was coming to them as I come to Alkan, those frustrations might well colour a greater part of my initial reception of their music and provoke a "yes, it's interesting, but..." sort of response.

All this comparison to Schumann, Liszt, Chopin, has to be understood as a mere provisional, Band-aid sort of criticism in place of an effort to really pinpoint Alkan's failings, that is, moments or fundamental considerations of poor judgment or missed opportunities to shine. Otherwise one is in the danger of having one's critique invalidated for applying incongruent standards. I am only beginning to become acquainted with his music, but I am having a lot of trouble appraising it fully even as it leaves me a bit less than impressed. I can't yet figure out how much of that has to do with KAlkan and how much with me.

Hmmm. I'm not sure if these comparisons help: probably my fault for mentioning other composers in the first place. Nor am I sure that my own approach to judging whether or not music is first-rate has that much in common with others on this MB. I certainly don't consider that "historical importance" is crucial to such a judgement. In fact, I've always been bothered by the use of the word "important" in relation to a composer or his music . . .

As far as Alkan is concerned, the music is unique in many ways, not least in his approach to the piano, his subversive conservationism and his "discipline" *. (And, paradoxically perhaps, his subversive conservationism does not prevent comparison with the visionary experimentalism of Satie on occasion).
Sometimes it is vulgar, extraordinarily repetitive and induces such a response as "Surely he won't? - Yes he has!": elements that perhaps encouraged the kind of criticism to which Van Dieren referred and which still piss people off. I'm rather thrilled by those elements in Alkan, but then that's me. The music still excites me, 35 or so years after I first heard the solo concerto.

* If anyone wants to consider a few dots, Chafing Dish kindly displayed some on the Mahler thread yesterday.http://r3ok.myforum365.com/index.php?topic=1450.msg51969#msg51969