<<  -- 6 --  Wilfrid Mellers    SECOND SIGHT

Perhaps the most powerful, as well as startling, music on this CD is the earliest in date, and the least known: the Trois Morceaux dans le genre pathétique that form Alkan's opus 15. The three pieces make a substantial work lasting half an hour. The first number, called 'Aime-moi', would seem to involve sacred as well as profane love, though its romanticism is more overt than is usually the case with Alkan; indeed the opening phrase is almost Chopinesque in its fusion of lyrical aspiration with tendresse [listen -- track 8, 0:00-0:56]. Yet the key is A flat minor, with its seven deadly flats; and as the textures cumulatively intensify, so the music acquires Alkan's typical necromantic flavour, reaching a level of complexity such that even the experienced Ronald Smith complained that it must have been written for an extinct 'race of seven-fingered pianists'. Greatly though we are indebted to Smith, one has to admit that, in Marc-André Hamelin, one of those seven-fingered keyboard virtuosi seems to have been reborn; and he confirms this with his hair-raising performance of the second piece, Le vent; which predates the famous wind-piece from the minor-keyed etudes, This early vent was Alkan's best-known -- possibly his only-known -- piece before the pioneer work of Lewenthal and Smith; Sorabji thought it was much more potent than the later work, possibly because, in typical Alkan style, it fuses its whirling wind-noise in chromatic demisemiquavers with a rigidly formal march that in context sounds more forlorn than heroic [listen -- track 9, 1:14-2:23]. That the march can exist at all, through the wind's wild wailing, is remarkable, and I suppose Alkan intended it as a tribute to human courage. The visual appearance of this piece in score is almost as alarming as its sound!

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