Alkan - Concerto for Solo Piano - Hyperion: CDA67569 - CD or download

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If you are yet to be convinced by Valentin Alkan's music, this intelligent and magnificently played programme, displaying contrasting sides of the composer's personality, is for you. As for... — BBC Music Magazine, September 2007, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 28th Aug 2007
Catalogue No: CDA67569
Label: Hyperion
Length: 67 minutes

Gramophone Awards

2008

Finalist - Instrumental
BBC Music Magazine

September 2007

Disc of the month
Gramophone Magazine

Awards Issue 2007

Editor's Choice

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Alkan: Concerto for Solo Piano Op. 39

Work length49:39

$3.30

$4.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

1. Allegro assai

Track length28:21

$1.10

$1.50

2. Adagio

Track length11:54

$1.10

$1.50

3. Allegretto alla barbaresca

Track length9:24

$1.10

$1.50

Alkan: Troisième recueil de chants, Op. 65

Work length17:53

$6.60

$9.00

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

I. Vivante

Track length2:46

$1.10

$1.50

II. Esprits follets: Prestissimo

Track length1:39

$1.10

$1.50

III. Canon: Assez vivement

Track length2:33

$1.10

$1.50

IV. Tempo giusto

Track length3:41

$1.10

$1.50

V. Horace et Lydie: Vivacissimo

Track length3:14

$1.10

$1.50

VI. Barcarolle: Assez lentement

Track length4:00

$1.10

$1.50

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Alkan was one of the greatest composer-pianists in history, with a voice as original as Chopin or Liszt, and a technique that even Liszt admitted was the greatest he had ever known. His music is of surpassing difficulty, and fell into relative obscurity in an age where published music was frequently aimed at amateurs. Its greatness is undeniablebut it unquestionably requires performances of unceasing brilliance. Alkans Concerto for solo piano is one of the great pianistic high-wire actsan epic work which demands unprecedented levels of technical ability and physical stamina. It is conceived on a breathtakingly grand scale and is rich with both orchestral sonorities and lyrical pianistic passages. The Troisime recueil de chants is a delightful rarity, rescued here from oblivion by the wonderful Marc-Andre Hamelin, who with his transcendent technique is simply one of the greatest living performers of this intoxicating music.

Reviews

September 2007

If you are yet to be convinced by Valentin Alkan's music, this intelligent and magnificently played programme, displaying contrasting sides of the composer's personality, is for you. As for the performance, if anyone can play it better, expect to see the devil as their agent. It is not simply that Hamelin can negotiate the ferocious technical challenges. Like a great ballet dancer, he maintains a clarity and beauty of line, so that the shape of the music is always clear and seems natural, however unnatural the demands made by Alkan. ...this is playing of the highest order in music that should be at the heart of the Romantic repertoire.

2010

This is Marc-André Hamelin's second recording of the Alkan Concerto for Solo Piano (the first for Music & Arts dates from 1992) and he now trumps his previous ace with a performance of the Concerto of such brilliance and lucidity that one can only listen in awe and amazement.
Scaling even the most ferocious hurdles with yards to spare, he is blessedly free to explore the very heart of Alkan's bewildering interplay of austerity and monstrous elaboration. In the gigantic first movement you can hear avalanches of notes given with the rarest focus and trenchancy.
And whether you turn to the finale's helter-skelter pages (with their curious Eastern underpinnings) or the baleful central Adagio, you can only marvel at such a unique mix of blazing if nonchalantly deployed virtuosity and poetic conviction.
For his substantial encore Hamelin gives us Alkan's Troisième recueil de chants where outward convention vies with that sinister and pervasive oddity so central to this composer's nature. No 3 is a near bitonal canon, No 4 a polonaise with memories of the Etudes from which the Concerto is drawn and a crazy, race-away coda, while the concluding Barcarolle contains ironic echoes of Liszt's Au lac de Wallenstadt.
All this is superbly recorded and presented, prompting some not unreasonable conjecture: if Liszt feared Alkan's mastery as a pianist he may well have feared Hamelin's.

A performance of the Concerto of such brilliance and lucidity that one can only listen in awe and amazement. Scaling even the most ferocious hurdles with yards to spare, he is blessedly free to explore the very heart of Alkan’s bewildering interplay of austerity and monstrous elaboration … You can
only marvel at such a unique mix of blazing if nonchalantly deployed virtuosity and poetic conviction … All of this is superly recorded and presented, prompting some not unreasonable conjecture: if Liszt feared Alkan’s mastery as a pianist he may well have feared Hamelin’s

The sheer keyboard brilliance of Hamelin’s playing is exceptional. The breathtaking clarity with which he articulates even the most ferocious passages, while unerringly projecting melodic shapes that are often obscured under welters of notes, never fails to dazzle, and the way in which he sustains the huge first movement of the Concerto so that each discursive paragraph seems a natural consequence of what precedes it is a triumph of pure musical will

Hamelin’s playing here is as breathtaking as ever—it is hard to believe that a lot of it is humanly possible—but, more than simply a dazzling panoply of notes, it conveys a deep musical and expressive range

Alkan - Concerto for Solo Piano

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