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Charles-Valentin Alkan

About Me

Charles-Valentin Alkan (November 30, 1813–March 29, 1888)Son of a Jewish schoolmaster, Charles-Valentin Morhange was born on 30th November1813 in Paris, and took his father's first name, Alkan, as his last name. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at six, and made his concert debut at twelve. By the age of twenty-four he had become the leading French pianist, was friends with Chopin and admired by Liszt. By the mid 1830s he was living in the Square d'Orleans, where he kept two apartments, one above the other. After the publication of his Trois Grandes Études Op. 76 in 1838, he disappeared from public view for six years, emerging with the publication of a number of what would become typical Alkan pieces, including the world's first work to depict a railway train, Le Chemin de Fer. He also returned to the concert stage in April of 1844, and the audience for his first recital contained both Chopin and Liszt. From that time onwards, he suffered a number of disappointments, and he became increasingly reclusive. He (not unreasonably) expected to succeed his teacher Joseph Zimmerman as Professeur de Piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but was overlooked for this position in favour of his less talented contemporary Marmontel. He had the misfortune to publish his Grande Sonate Op. 33 (see excerpt below) and the twelve major-key studies in 1848,a time when many people of influence in the musical world had left Paris because of the social upheavals arising from the revolution. Following this, he again withdrew from public view, and re-emerged in 1857 with his magnum opus, Douze Études dans les tons mineurs Op. 39. Having withdrawn from the concert stage in 1855, in 1873 Alkan inaugurated an annual series of recitals devoted almost exclusively to the works of other composers. Unlike Liszt, Alkan did not use his pianistic talents to promote his own music, which is no doubt part of the reason it fell into obscurity after (and even before) his death in 1888.

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Music:

Member Since: 03/07/2006
Band Website: http://www.alkansociety.org/
Band Members: John Ogdon, Jack Gibbons, Raymond Lewenthal, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Bernard Rengeissen, Ronald Smith, "Michael Nanasakov"
Influences: Chopin, Liszt
Sounds Like: 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, examples of his compositions calling for velocity, enormous leaps at speed, long stretches of fast repeated notes, and the maintenance of widely-spaced contrapuntal lines. Notable compositions include the Grande Sonate Les Quatre Ages (opus 33), depicting the Four Ages of Man, and the two sets of etudes in all the major and minor keys (opus 35 in the major and opus 39 in the minor). These surpass even the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt in scale and difficulty. 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 alone takes nearly an hour to play, and presents a great challenge to the performer. Number twelve of Op. 39 is a set of variations Le festin d'Esope ("Aesop's Feast"). He also composed other programmatic pieces, such as Le chemin de fer (1844) which may be the earliest composition giving a musical picture of a railroad. His chamber music compositions include a violin sonata, a cello sonata, and a piano trio. One of his most bizarre pieces is the Marche funebre sulla morte d'un papagallo (Funeral march for a parrot), 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 first chamber concerto begins in A minor and ends in E major). 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 distant keys such as E major and the occasional triple-sharp.Alkan seems to have had few followers, although his admirers included Ferruccio Busoni and Anton Rubinstein. The latter dedicated a concerto to him. Debussy and Ravel both studied his music under teachers who knew Alkan personally and noted their debt to his examples. The composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji promoted Alkan's music in his reviews and criticism, and composed a work with a movement 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.For many years after his death, Alkan's work was almost completely forgotten. There has been a steady revival of interest in his compositions over the course of the twentieth century. Works by Alkan have been recorded by Egon Petri, John Ogdon, Raymond Lewenthal, Ronald Smith, Jack Gibbons, Mark Latimer, Stephanie McCallum and Marc-André Hamelin among others.
Type of Label: Major

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