| Etude No. 7 in E-flat major "L'incendie au village voisin" (Fire in the Neighboring Village) from the 12 Etudes in all the Major Keys Op. 35 (1847) Quoted from Ronald Smith's Alkan, The Man, The Music: "L'incendie au village voisin is an unclassifiable extension of the genre, a kind of free-ranging, pictorial fantasy akin to the Lisztian symphonic poem of the succeeding decade. The occasional excursion into a more extravagant realism, with its inescapable twang of silent film music, falls uncomfortably on modern ears and has thrown even Alkan's staunchest admirers into disarray. 'A flat style' declares the French musicologist Georges Beck, 'and effects that are mere noise.' Could this writer have ever strayed upon a pioneering essay on the composer in Bernard van Dieren's Down among the Dead Men (1935) in which the piece is described as 'an exquisite tone painting like one of the movements in Harold in Italy'? Three years earlier Sorabji had also praised it as 'very remarkable; most original in form.' All the same, L'incendie, perhaps more than any other of Alkan's important compositions, demands the most persuasive artistry to fulfil such claims. In lesser hands it will sound faded, shallow, naive, its turbulences turned to bombast. The work opens quietly, expansively. A gentle song of the countryside, marked 'amoroso', steals reassuringly on the ear. Romantic modulations colour the landscape. Nothing it seems can disturb the pastoral calm; not even the distant menace of ... |
