Charles-Valentin Alkan - Music

Music

See also: List of compositions by Charles-Valentin Alkan

Like Chopin, Alkan wrote almost exclusively for the keyboard, although in Alkan's case this included the organ and the pédalier (a piano with a pedal board), of which he was a noted exponent. Some of his music requires a dazzling virtuosity, calling for extreme velocity, enormous leaps at speed, long stretches of fast repeated notes, and the maintenance of widely-spaced contrapuntal lines. Such examples of his music have been reviewed as "ferociously" and even "impossibly" difficult. The pianist Marc-André Hamelin has said:

The aspect of Alkan that is most apparent when people who don't know him listen to him for the first time is that his music is difficult to play... But in a way, I wish that it did not take a formidable technique ... the great musical worth of Alkan's music makes it worthwhile to master those difficulties.

Alkan's notable compositions include the Grande sonate Les quatre âges (Op. 33), depicting the Four Ages of Man, and the two sets of études in all the major and minor keys (Op. 35 and 39, respectively). The opus 39 collection contains the Symphony for Solo Piano (numbers four, five, six and seven), and the Concerto for Solo Piano (numbers eight, nine and ten). The Concerto takes nearly an hour to play. Number twelve of Op. 39 is a set of variations Le festin d'Ésope ("Aesop's Feast").

Amongst a variety of other works, Alkan also composed programmatic pieces, such as Le chemin de fer ("The Railroad", Op. 27) which may be the earliest composition giving a musical picture of a steam train.

Alkan's chamber music compositions include a violin sonata, a cello sonata, and a piano trio. One of his most bizarre pieces is the Marcia funebre, sulla morte d'un Pappagallo ("Funeral march on the death of a parrot", 1859), for three oboes, bassoon and voices.

Musically, many of his ideas were unconventional, even innovative. Some of his multi-movement compositions show "progressive tonality" which would have been familiar to the later Danish composer, Carl Nielsen (for example, Alkan's sonata Les quatre âges begins in D major and ends in G-sharp minor). He was rigorous in avoiding enharmonic spelling, occasionally modulating to keys containing double-sharps or double-flats, so pianists are occasionally required to come to terms with unusual keys such as E-sharp major, enharmonic equivalent to F major, and the occasional triple-sharp.