| The second piece, Le vent, from Charles-Valentin Alkan's gorgeous Trois morceaux dans le genre pathetique, op. 15. Played by Marc-André Hamelin. This one is a re-upload of Hexameron's video, as he's going to take his one down soon. Quoted from Ronald Smith's Alkan, The Man, The Music: "Le vent was once a familiar piece de resistance in the recital programmes of Harold Bauer and Adela Verne. Sorabji's complaint that most people only think of Alkan as the composer of Le vent must fall strangely on modern ears that have never caught the most fleeting snatch of this superannuated war-horse. On the face of it Le vent appears to be no more than a period piece of pyrotechnics: 'a chromatic howl over an idea from Beethoven's A major symphony' was Schumann's unkind description. Despite, however, a superficial resemblance to the Allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh the true ancestry of the dirge-like chorale that inhabits its outer sections should be sought elsewhere, for example in the great slow movements from Schubert's last two sonatas. The spine-chilling appearance on paper of a merciless stream of sextuplets is misleading. Their constant rise and fall should sound impressionistic until Alkan unleashes the elements in two pages of unthematic, chromatic storm. His subsequent combination of chromatic volleys with tremolando must have impressed Liszt for he used both devices at a similar point in the 1851 version of Chasse-neige, but more concisely. Henri Blanchard's description ... |
