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4.0 out of 5 stars
Ringeissen puts up a great struggle, Alkan wins in the end, Jun 18 2003
My own private history gives a good example of the slow recognition of Alkan as a premier romantic piano composer. In 1989, after attending piano recitals for a quarter of a century I had never heard any of Alkan's works in concert or on radio. In that same year, Alkan made his first appearance in the novel "Au Pair" by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans. One of the novel's characters spent his time devoted to studying Alkan's music, which was described as unconventional and extremely difficult. A decade later, I finally had my first close encounter with Alkan after buying the John Ogdon issue in the great pianist of the 20th century series. Ogdon's performance of Alkan's "Concerto for Piano Solo" was certainly interesting, just like the Busoni concerto, but still has me wondering what really was so great about this pianist.However, a year later the purchase of Marc-Andre Hamelin's first Hyperion Alkan cd completely changed my Alkan perception. Especially, after getting the scores of the music played, my admiration for both composer and performer knows no bounds. With my hands on all of Hamelin's Alkan, I was more than a little distressed to find out that he has no further plans for Alkan recordings. Le Roy se repose, vive le Roy ! Thus, a venture into alternative performers. Especially, because of their user-friendly budget, I was tickled by this disc and it's billing as volume I (of the complete Alkan catalogue?). The disc at hand is a reissue of a 1993 recording on Naxos' sister label Marco Polo. The disc starts with Alkan's most popular work Le Festin D'Esope. This work is a real crowd pleasing theme with variations, an important element of Helen DeWitt's great novel "The Last Samurai", that contains stretches that I consider humanly impossible after getting Hamelin's edition of the score from Dover. Even though Ringeissen's technique is a few million light years beyond mine, he remains human and really struggles through some of these diabolical passages. The rest of the album containes works that I had not heard before. Alkan's 12 studies Opus 35 are a blend between Chopin's Opus 10/25 and Liszt's Etudes d'execution transcendente, matching their technical difficulty without coming close to their compositional level. Yet, just like Saint Saens' etudes, that got the 5-star treatment by Piers Lane, Alkan's Opus 35 deserves more attention than it is currently getting. Both in his custom harmonics and in multi-layered piano writing Alkan really created a universe of his own. This universe is admittedly cruel since it poses technical difficulties that are hardly surmountable for all but the best of pianists. Unfortunately, Ringeissen doesn't live in the speed demon realm of the likes of Pogorelich, Berezovsky, Luganski, or Sultanov, just to name a few non-Alkan players. Yet, most of the time his playing is more than adequate and enjoyable. Still, Ringeissen often has his hands so full, that many unique aspects of Alkan's music fall between the cracks. While a comparison of le Festin with Hamelin's version shows that Ringeissen does not get enough time to flesh out Alkan's sense of humor, many moments in the studies, where everything seems to be hitting the fan, lack the full romantic sense of heroism and bravura that the music exudes. Yet, while waiting for other pianists to jump the Alkan bandwagon -Pogorelich who is currently playing the even more obscure Martucci would be an obvious choice- Ringeissen's blood, sweat and tears should not remain un-praised. Unfortunately, the recording quality is rather poor. The piano sound is metallic and the recording sounds murky in the denser passages. Moreover, all of Alkan's prescribed hammering results in an instrument that seems in dire need of tuning on some of the tracks.
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