Piano Classics seem to be running a small stable of Alkanists in their
ongoing and engrossing releases devoted to the composer’s music. Alessandro
Deljaven has been entrusted with the responsibility for, amongst other
things, The Trois Grandes Etudes and Sonatine whilst Vincenzo Maltempo
has already recorded (Piano 0056)
Le Festin d’Ésope,
Trois
Morceauxdans le genre pathétique and, indeed, the same Op.61
Sonatine
as Deljaven, whose disc (PIANO 0051) also included the
Deux Petites
Pièces, Op.60.
The focus on Maltempo’s latest disc is the mighty
Concerto for solo
piano, which forms part of the even mightier edifice called
Douze
Études dans tous les tons mineurs, Op.39, published in 1857. This disc
constitutes the third (of four) in Maltempo’s Alkan survey, which will take
in the whole of the Op.39 set.
The focus on Maltempo’s latest disc is the mighty
Concerto for solo
piano, which forms part of the even mightier edifice called
Douze
Études dans tous les tons mineurs, Op.39, published in 1857. Though
Egon Petri recorded a truncated version before the war, it was probably
Ronald Smith’s recording in 1968 that alerted people to the status of the
Concerto, and a ripple of disc followed. They were dominated by Ogdon’s and,
most particularly, Lewenthal’s, though since then Jack Gibbons, for ASV, and
Marc-André Hamelin for Hyperion have cast their musical hats into the ring,
and others too have ventured onto this most powerful of grounds.
Maltempo has by now shown himself to be a powerful interpreter of Alkan,
which he needs to be in the expanse of the Concerto. Here he shows how to
fuse the bravura and the more elfin, prismic moments in this work. The
virtuosity is commanding but the poetry is bewitching. The flux and fluid
flow of Alkan’s writing is rendered, through single-minded application, at
once logical and also strange. Digital clarity lays bare Alkan’s colossal
demands but never strips the music of its mystery, so that the lyric tracery
of the vast first movement – it’s as long as the whole of Liszt’s Sonata –
conjoins with moments of hymnal chording to maximum advantage. This is not
to suggest that Maltempo underplays the toccata-like drama – he may not
quite equal Hamelin in implacability here - but rather more to suggest that
he navigates his way (and ours) through this edifice with naturalness and
refinement. These dappled moments and their brothers, the stormy petrel
outbursts, are more conjunctive in the central movement where one feels the
music increasing in tension for the increasingly triumphant finale, its
‘barbaresca’ element finely realised by maltempo
Maltempo shows throughout that he has both the technique and the ear for
poetic mystery that the work needs. In the three opus mates he also shows a
convincing command of Alkan’s more single-minded pursuits.
Comme le
vent is a technical tour de force, hands flying everywhere, a piece of
mid-nineteenth-century pianistics that must still inspire dread in the
unwary. In the octave study,
En rhyhme molossique, the difficulties
are, if not surmounted, then at least largely hides from the acute ear. This
was the piece that Busoni premièred in Berlin and which earned for Alkan
some of the worst criticisms of his career. Finally, Maltempo ends with the
study in leaps,
Scherzo diabolico, in which he doesn’t overlook the
powerhouse chording – as if he could.
This is a formidable disc, excellently recorded and – as I hope I’ve made
clear – splendidly interpreted.
Jonathan Woolf
