<<  -- 7 --  Wilfrid Mellers    SECOND SIGHT

The third and longest piece, Morte, is both the most overtly deathly and the most startlingly innovative [listen -- track 10, 11:09-12:05]. In dark E flat minor again, it follows sundry composers from Berlioz onwards in introducing the plainchant Dies Irae as a leitmotif, though the point lies in the music's audacity in confronting death's deathliness. The Dies Irae tune is swept aside by cascading scales and arpeggios, allowing a grandly sustained lament to sing in human passion, if not triumph; leading into an uncanny bell-tolling episode which Ravel clearly recalled in his piano piece, Le Gibet. Again, Alkan proffers no easy answers: the aria is succeeded by a furious presto which has something of the electrical energy of Berlioz, but is also prophetic of some of the high-points of Alkan's later, and presumptively maturer, music. These early pieces have not been frequently played, given their scary technical challenges. Hamelin seems to be unperturbedly in charge of them: so buy this record and wonder; and while you are about it, you might as well buy, too, Hamelin's astonishing earlier disc of piano music by the Brazilian Villa-Lobos. He has chosen what are, in my view, by far the finest works of this composer -- the one-movement Rudepoema and the two suites called A prole do Bebe, the first a savagely virtuosic fiesta that makes one's hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine, the suites an anthology of pieces ostensibly about children's toy animals -- in which a kid's kitten hides the heart of a jungle jaguar, and it's unclear whether the child or the cat is the more distraught. I've known these pieces for well over half a century; yet only since listening to Hamelin's recent recording have I realised how terrifyingly enthralling they are.

For help listening to the sound extracts here, please refer to our questions & answers page.