Alkan the Awesome

​​★★★★★

In the age of Chopin and Liszt, Charles-Valentin Morhange (known as Alkan) was the pianist they all feared. So formidable was his technique and so elevated his ambition that only Alkan was able to perform the works he composed at the prescribed speed. Chopin, in his will, entrusted him with completing his unfinished works. Alkan, around 1850, was the foremost pianist in Paris.

Then things fell apart. Rejected by the Conservatoire as head of its piano department, Alkan retired to his apartment and lived as a hermit. When he finally emerged two decades later, all the great pianists attended his late-night, unadvertised recitals for a glimpse of the unattainable.

Less well known still was his brief tenure as organist at the Rothschild synagogue on rue Nazareth, a role Alkan resigned in a matter of weeks. The British-Australian pianist Joseph Nolan has assembled all of Alkan’s organ works and recorded them in a Luxembourg church. The results are never less than imposing.

A set of “11 grand preludes and transcription of Handel’s Messiah” soon takes leave of the original and breezes off into Alkan’s own mind world. The seventh prelude “alla giudesca” seems to be intended for synagogue worship and the 10th has elements of ribald Hasidic dance, altogether alien to the organ of a formal place of worship.

A set of plainchant preludes is less obviously provocative, but Alkan’s 15-minute extemporisation of Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress” is possibly the least reverent approach to the Christian Reformation, full of quirks and fun. Nolan, on this account, is a versatile organist with a mind of his own and this album is categorically in a class of its own. Nothing like it anywhere on record. Literally awesome.