Charles-Valentin Alkan - Influence

Influence

Alkan seems to have had few followers. The claim that Ernest Fanelli was Alkan's pupil at the Conservatoire is mistaken, as Fanelli came to the Conservatoire in 1876, long after Alkan had left it. However, Alkan had important admirers, including Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Anton Rubinstein, Egon Petri and Kaikhosru Sorabji. Liszt said that Alkan had the finest piano technique of anyone he knew. Rubinstein dedicated his fifth piano concerto to him. Busoni ranked Alkan with Liszt and Chopin as a master of the pianoforte étude in his preface to the first volume of the collected edition of Liszt's pianoforte works. In the first half of the twentieth century, when Alkan's name was still obscure, Busoni and Petri included his works in their performances. Sorabji published an article on Alkan in his book Around Music. Sorabji promoted Alkan's music in his reviews and criticism, and his sixth and final symphony for piano solo, completed in 1976, includes a section entitled Quasi Alkan.

Alkan's organ compositions were known to César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns and others and their influence can be traced in the French organ school up to the present day. They have only recently been recorded, however; the English organist Kevin Bowyer is committing all of them to disc for the British label Toccata Classics.

For much of the 20th century, Alkan's work seemed forgotten, but was steadily revived. The English pianist Ronald Smith in particular championed his music through performances, recordings, a biography and the Alkan Society of which he was president for many years. Works by Alkan have also been recorded by John Ogdon, Raymond Lewenthal, Jack Gibbons, Egon Petri, Mark Latimer, Stephanie McCallum, Alan Weiss, Steven Osborne and Marc-André Hamelin, amongst others. Ronald Stevenson has composed a piano piece Le festin d'Alkan (referring to Alkan's Op. 39 No. 12) and the composer Michael Finnissy has also written piano pieces referring to Alkan, e.g. Alkan-Paganini, No. 5 of The History of Photography in Sound. Marc-André Hamelin's Étude No. IV is a moto perpetuo study combining themes from Alkan's Symphony, Op. 39 No. 7, and Alkan's own perpetual motion étude, Op. 76 No. 3. It is dedicated to Averil Kovacs and François Luguenot, respectively activists in the English and French Alkan Societies. As Hamelin writes in his preface to this étude, the idea to combine these came from the composer Alistair Hinton, the finale of whose Piano Sonata No. 5 (1994–95) includes a substantial section entitled "Alkanique".

On 25 April 2009, BBC Radio 3 dedicated a 45 minute program to Alkan's life, presented by Piers Lane and with contributions by John White and David Conway.