Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)
After a relatively brief delay, tomorrow will see the release of a new album surveying solo piano music by Charles-Valentin Alkan. The title of the album is Le Petit Concert, and the pianist is Andrew Yiangou. In consulting my archives, I discovered that I have not written about Alkan since April of 2021, when a solo piano recital by Zak Mustille prepared a program that coupled the second movement of Alkan’s Opus 33 sonata to the second movement of Charles Ives’ first piano sonata. The pianist apparently believed that one wild ride deserves another!
Yiangou’s “ride” through the Alkan repertoire is not quite as wild. Nevertheless, I was reminded about a couplet that Allan Sherman coined as “background” for a performance at Tanglewood of the overture to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 492 opera, The Marriage of Figaro:
On this farm he had some goats,
Mozart still got lots more notes.
The density of notes in just about any solo piano composition by Alkan is likely to overwhelm even the most attentive listener! There are, fortunately, at least a few moments of quietude, such as the prelude given the title “Mélodie de la synagogue.”
Taken as a whole, the album has an arch structure. The keystone is the Opus 61 in A minor. My advance material served up the tongue-in-cheek description “misleadingly titled Sonatina.” Indeed, I agree entirely with that description, which continues, “This is a large-scale sonata of huge technical challenges.”
So, yes, there are plenty of notes on this new album. Still, Yiangou knows how to deliver them without overwhelming the listener. Personally, I have enjoyed listening to the selections he prepared for the “program” of the recording. Nevertheless, I am willing to confess that this is “the sort of thing that people who like that sort of thing will like!”
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