Alkan’s
Recueils de Chants are remarkable Mendelssohnian tone
poems
for piano. In this first edition of a complete series of the five books,
Stephanie
McCallum plays the first three, adding a work that is making its first
appearance
on CD,
Une fuse, a delicious spinning song, arpeggiated and drenched
in
Mendelssohnian vibrancy and drama.
The early and mid-nineteenth century vogue for songlike piano pieces
evolved largely because of the expressive advances in piano manufacture.
Alkan was no less enamoured of this potential than his slightly younger
contemporary Mendelssohn. These beautiful compositions follow defiantly in
the footsteps of the older man with each six-piece set patterned after the
Songs without Words. And yet though the lyricism is directly redolent
of Mendelssohn most of the transitional passages are distinctively
Alkanesque, though nowhere near as quirky as one may otherwise associate
with him.
The first two books share the same opus number and year of
composition. The opening of Book I is wondrously lyrical but could it be, in
performance, just a touch more ‘vivement’ than here? That rather
depends on how one judges the appropriate tempo. Certainly McCallum is a
practised exponent of Alkan’s music and she has spent a number of
years performing and recording it. She is alive to his affectionate
Allegrettos and is always extremely effective - I would say at her
most supremely stylish - in the third movement
Chants (or Choeur or
Canon). She deftly evokes the dog bark in that of Book I, and so too the
delicate bell peals in the succeeding piece. The flowing agitation of the
tensile fifth pieces of the sets is also finely conveyed.
The Second book opens with a harp evocation - a beautiful hymnal
eclogue, though Alkan’s more obstinate side is evident in the
Allegretto. He seems to reach back to earlier French composers in the
Chant de guerre, a sometimes cartoonish picture, though one far
removed from the Franco-German School of 1812 pianism, which tended to
depict Napoleonic battles with the subtlety of a blunderbuss. Perhaps
it’s me but I find McCallum’s performance of the
Procession (No.4) more mordant than ‘candlelit’, as
suggested in the notes.
The Third Book is again warmly and acutely performed. It is quite a
long way, nevertheless, interpretatively speaking, from McCallum to
Marc-André Hamelin in his recording of this Book on Hyperion
CDA67569. Hamelin is very much the bristling virtuoso, an Alkan gunslinger
to his fingertips. Thus he is fleet to the point of relentless in the
Esprits follets, where Prestissimo really does mean Prestissimo. The
Schumannesque
Polonaise in
tempo giusto is, in Hamelin’s
hands, a dynamic March where in McCallum’s it is more leisurely. A
test case is the piece called
Horace et Lydie. Her Alkan punctuation
is the more disjunctive, her stresses more pronounced, less avid; her rubati
are also more evident. Hamelin is the more flowing, less willing to break
the constant flux of Alkan’s ideas. How one responds is very much a
matter of taste. With Hamelin, Alkan sounds more supercharged and more of a
virtuoso vehicle. With McCallum he is more of the poet. And both positions
are undoubtedly reflective of the two performers concerned.
With first class booklet notes and recording quality, this first
release in the series can be warmly commended.
Jonathan Woolf
