the great composer charles-valentin alkan

alkan's 200th anniversary is next week and he still seems rather neglected compared to his contemporaries like liszt (two years older) and chopin, even accounting for his status as eternal lesser. there doesn't seem to have been any huge mnstrm effort to hype his work or his unusual biography (one of the first avowedly jewish composers in the western classical tradition), and although the alkan society in the uk seem to be doing good work, the typical heritage industry onslaught of new recordings and articles etc is more of a trickle. anyway i think he was amazing and will use the epithet great even if he is not in the usual radio 3 canon.

it's almost as if his famous diffidence persists beyond the grave, and a lot of his later music does become more hermetic. the showpiece stuff is absolutely not though, and i would recommend it to anyone fond of liszt, chopin or schumann. to some extent the guardians of alkan are the virtuoso piano composers like busoni, sorabji and their acolytes, and he has become typecasted as another of those filigreed technical wizards who seem both too meretricious and too recondite for general consumption. i don't think he has any of the guileless excess of a lot of that tradition though, and the best of his music is perfectly approachable and thrilling especially when interpreted by pianists like lewenthal, hamelin or ronald smith (not a huge name but an important proponent of alkan and i like his recordings).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzzCpL_i7K8

three pieces played by hamelin, the second the unfortunately translated 'mad woman prelude' is astonishingly precocious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py7BxB51OTA

the second movement of the sonata of the four ages (20-30-40-50 years old) is probably my single favourite bit of alkan

Wow, I had never heard that prelude; precocious is right! Sounds like Debussy or Nuages Gris-era Liszt.

I love the early piece Souvenirs, particularly the first movement, which sounds like a lost Chopin ballade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPTcPFfi8nU

v liszt-y, the same kind of childlike excitement of workouts of single ideas and hilarious noisemaking <3 <3. That 2nd movement is comedy on the page

v apt music for my mood ty nakhers

incredible 4chanesque shitfight in that first video's comments

2nd and 3rd pieces extraordinary

Love Alkan - especially the Hamelin performances.

Didn't he have one of those weird composer deaths? Cupboard fell on him or something?

the legend that gets printed is he reached for the talmud and it fell on him or a bookshelf collapsed or suchlike

how to ensure the alkan thread receives the attention it deserves

honestly i thought for a few minutes about meretricious titles and settled on 'the great' what a load of shit

listening. title is perfectly adequate.

not really cutting it in these days of 120 character titles with multiple capitalizations and subclauses

"Bob Dylan" is the new style we shd be aspiring to

will listen. very enjoyable thread.

Alkan retains a paradoxical posthumous relationship to fame, as he did during his lifetime. In an 1860s image, one of the few photographic portraits which survives, Alkan turns his back to the camera in a reflex action akin to a Hasid responding to camera-wielding tourists in Mea Shearim. In a 2007 article in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, musicologist Jacqueline Waeber interpreted this photo as showing that “Alkan turns his back on the world and its mundane glory. This is evidenced in his progressive abandonment of a career as a virtuoso.” Waeber added that in Alkan’s works, “virtuosity has to be taken in its purest literary sense, as an ideal search for virtu, from the Latin virtus, the quality of human excellence as expressed in any kind of exercise — artistic, intellectual and, of course, spiritual. Alkan’s reluctance to embrace the public career of the virtuoso also finds its roots here… Alkan practised virtuosity as a form of asceticism: a paradoxical conception of virtuosity, then, not aimed at performance and public recognition, but rather viewed as a form of solitary spiritual exercise. It may even be wondered whether the technical requirements of his piano writing might not have been motivated by his practice of Judaism.”

http://forward.com/articles/187754/celebrating--years-of-french-jewish-composer-ch/

that is a good article, also clarifies the death-myth about the talmud

thanks for that, man. Benjamin Ivry is good, I read his book on Ravel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mfke8M6be4

today's featured article on wikipedia

that is vastly complex

http://i.imgur.com/jMbDF4m.jpg

very good

this is excellent for a rainy sunday afternoon, goulash slowly ruminating on the stove.

in fact the feeling is like this muriel spark line:

The lawn lay beautiful as eternity. A servant was calling in Eddy's two children from an upper window; presently their high voices came quarrelling from the shrubbery and faded round the back of the house. There was a stir in the beech leaves like papers being gently shuffled into order. The drawing-in of an English afternoon took place, with its fugitive sorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Z5P1gAjyE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m52MJ6hJx3I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VW2ms-jpCY

the entire cycle played in one recital :)