Charles-Valentin Alkan is no longer the obscure figure he was during most of the twentieth century. Long dismissed as a writer of mere technical exercises, his music – gradually rescued from neglect by Egon Petri, Raymond Lewenthal, Ronald Smith, John Ogdon and other dedicated pianists – has amply confirmed Busoni’s judgment (delivered in his Preface to the Études of Liszt) that Alkan stood with Liszt, Chopin, Schumann and Brahms as one of the five greatest composers for the piano since Beethoven. Alkan is now generally recognised to have been exactly that – one of the truest of Beethoven’s heirs in terms of his structural handling of rhythm, the supreme exponent of the French style sévère, and the creator of some of the most dauntingly difficult (and powerful, and tender, and sardonic) piano music in the entire repertoire of the instrument. Born into a large and prodigiously musical Parisian Jewish family of Alsatian extraction, Alkan (he was born Charles-Valentin Morhange, but took the forename of his father, the piano teacher Alkan Morhange, for surname) became a student at the Paris Conservatoire at the age of six. He made his public debut at seven (as a violinist!), gained the Conservatoire first prize for piano at the age of ten, and gave his first public piano recital when he was twelve. Until the mid-1840s he was one of the most celebrated piano virtuosi in Paris, and often shared the platform with Liszt, Thalberg and, especially, Chopin – who, with George Sand, became a close friend and next-door neighbour. But around the time of Chopin’s death in 1849 Alkan withdrew from public life and devoted himself to composition. Apart from a brief return to the concert stage in the mid-1870s, when he gave several series of recitals remarkable for their technical difficulty and imaginative programming, he remained an apparently misanthropic recluse, a vague legend in his own lifetime. The circumstances of his death are obscure, though the traditional account that he was crushed by a falling bookcase while reaching for a volume of the Talmud seems likely to have been a myth promulgated by his natural son, the pianist and pedagogue Elie Miriam Delaborde. Alkan is said to have been the only pianist in whose presence even Liszt felt nervous; and Vincent d’Indy, who heard him play near the end of his life, maintained that he surpassed Liszt in interpretative powers. He was admired for an absolute technical mastery, a striking range of colour, and most of all for a rhythmic discipline that scorned rubato. All these qualities are demanded by his own music. He wrote a handful orchestral scores (mostly lost) and some fine chamber works, but his reputation rests securely on his vast output for the piano. Hummel, Cherubini and Chopin were early influences, and Beethoven and Bach an abiding inspiration, for music which makes most imaginative use of the full range of the keyboard and often poses the performer fearsome rhythmic challenges to be taken at headlong pace in absolutely unyielding tempo (a typical example is the Allegro Barbaro from the twelve Études dans les Tons Majeures, Op. 35, published in 1847, which inspired Bartók’s similarly titled piece of over sixty years later). Alkan also displays striking harmonic individuality (especially in the use of diatonic dissonance) and an occasionally awesome grasp of large-scale structure. It is these features, quite as much as his uncanny skill at suggesting orchestral timbres in purely pianistic terms, which earned him the epithet bestowed by Hans von Bülow: ‘the Berlioz of the piano’. Yet Alkan should not be considered solely as a piano composer. Among his many attainments, he gained the premier prix d’orgue at the Paris Conservatoire in 1834, at the age of 21, and by all accounts his organ technique was as remarkable as his command of the piano. He was friendly with some leading contemporary organists, notably César Franck and Louis Lefébure-Wély (the latter is the dedicatee of one of the works included on this disc), but never occupied any post as organist of a church or synagogue. Theodore Bolte, in a centenary article on the composer, stated that Alkan practised his organ technique on a pedal-piano. So it was that he came to write a great deal of music for keyboard with pedals: this seems the best way to put the fact that, though some of the works in question are specifically designated for organ, a larger number assume performance on the pédalier or pedal-piano. This almost forgotten instrument (a piano with an additional keyboard of foot-pedals, as the name implies) was also written for by Schumann and by Franck. The important piano-manufacturing concern of Erard, with whom Alkan enjoyed a close association, was a producer of these instruments, one of which was put at Alkan’s disposal in the 1850s to assist him in the study of Bach’s organ music. This ‘piano à clavier de pédales’ became a favourite compositional medium, though naturally many of the resulting works are equally playable on the organ. (It should be remembered, however, that the two instruments have a completely different sound, the organ altogether lacking what the pianist-composer and Alkan-scholar Ronald Smith described as ‘the clanking resonance and attack of the pedal-piano’.) Altogether Alkan’s work for the keyboard/pedal medium add up to a sizable output in themselves. This is also an output that, to some extent, is less concerned with the apocalyptic and diabolic aspects of the composer’s musical personality than with simpler religious moods and expressions of faith. Except that, with Alkan, nothing is ever entirely simple, and his utter originality of approach is sometimes to be discovered in the most unlikely places and genres.