(++++) GALLIC EXTREMISTS

Charles-Valentin Alkan: Complete Piano Music, Volume 7—Early Works & Juvenilia: Variations sur un thème de Steibelt, Op.1; Les omnibus, variations, Op. 2; Il était un p’tit homme, rondoletto, Op. 3; Rondo brilliant pour piano et cordes ad libitum, Op. 4; Variations à la vielle sur l’air chanté par Mme. Persiani dans l’Elisir d’amore de G. Donizetti; “Ah! Segnata è la mia sorte” de l’opéra Anna Bolena de Donizetti, varié, Op. 16, No. 4; Air des Capulets et des Montaigus de Bellini (“La tremenda ultrice spada”), varié, Op. 16, No. 5; Variations quasi fantaisie sur une barcarolle napolitaine, Op. 16, No. 6; Rondeau chromatique, Op. 12. Mark Viner, piano. Piano Classics. $19.99. 

Satie: Piano Works—Petite ouverture à danser; Facheux exemple; Effronterie; Airs à faire fuir I-III; Son binocle; Profondeur; Idylle (à Debussy); Aubade (à Paul Dukas); Méditation (à Albert Roussel); Nocturnes I-III; Froide songerie; Prélude canin; Deux reveries I-II; Prélude de la porte héroique du ciel; Songe-creux; Caresse; Poésie; Désespoir agréable; Nostalgie; Préludes I-III. Christina Bjørkøe, piano. OUR Recordings. $17.99. 

     Although it is unlikely, objectively speaking, that French composers are any more eccentric than those of other nationalities, there are some French musicians whose thinking – musical and otherwise – is so far off the “norm” or “the beaten track” as to make one wonder just what was in the air they breathed. This is even more so when the eccentricities sound (literally) from opposite musical poles, from the grand and large-scale and intense and dramatic and precisely titled to ones that are small, delicate, evanescent, evaporative, and labeled with ambiguity bordering on meaninglessness. 

     And thus we come to Alkan and Satie. Marc Viner’s intrepid march through Alkan’s more-or-less complete piano works, the seventh volume of a projected maybe-18 depending on how many improbably missing pieces are eventually improbably rediscovered, takes listeners back to Alkan’s very first published piece, written when he was all of 12 years old and already asserting himself in the panoply of brilliant pianist/composers whose skill was exceeded only by the superficiality of their music. And who, to put it bluntly, cares? The Variations sur un thème de Steibelt and Les omnibus, variations are pure display pieces that display quite brilliantly even today – Viner is astonishingly adept at playing this suffocatingly difficult music – and any listener not left a bit breathless after hearing these performances probably needs some retuning of the musical version of an oxygen concentrator. That is to say that these pieces are breathtakingly difficult, thoroughly splendid in a thoroughly trivial way that in no degree minimizes their effectiveness and, if anything, increases it, since they never profess to be more than they are. Whether Alkan at this stage could profess to something higher is a moot point, although some of the pieces on this Piano Classics CD already begin to hint at much greater depth to come. As the titles of the opera-based variation sets make clear, Alkan was at pains to indicate exactly what then-highly-familiar material he used as the basis for these compositions, although interesting confusions and complications do arise from time to time: the supposed material from L’Elisir d’amore is actually from Ugo, Conti di Parigi (dating to the same year, 1832), and the designation à la vielle (“in hurdy-gurdy style”) does not seem to refer to anything in Alkan’s work or Donizetti’s but perhaps carries a mild tinge of sarcasm. In any case, Viner’s always-brilliant and often truly remarkable pianism shows all these pieces to be absolute gems of their kind – semi-precious gems, if you will, but ones that shine wonderfully in these amazingly polished performances. Hearing Alkan’s handling of the barcarolle napolitaine, for instance, provides a delightful aural contrast to Liszt’s use of the same melody in Années de pèlerinage, while the mere existence of the Les omnibus variations propels one’s ears to a time when an entire company of horse-drawn buses was built around an opera: Boieldieu’s La dame blanche. Superficial but far from trivial, the nine works on this disc – four of them world première recordings – provide fascinatingly foundational insight into Alkan’s compositional and pianistic thinking in the earliest years of a burgeoning career that would later be famously derailed by the personality peculiarities of the immensely talented but psychologically unstable virtuoso composer/performer. 

     That mixture of ability and instability is very much present in Erik Satie as well and is perhaps the only significant parallel between him and Alkan, despite the partial overlap of their lives (Satie was born in 1866; Alkan died in 1888). Alkan thought large; Satie was a miniaturist, indeed often a micro-miniaturist, creating numerous works lasting one minute or less. Alkan was given to grand pianistic gestures; Satie was a proto-minimalist whose works often sound as if they are barely there. Alkan’s music (unlike his personality) is deeply extroverted and proclamatory; Satie’s (unlike his personality) is withdrawn, quiet, tentative. Alkan’s pieces’ titles are as clear and explicit as possible; Satie’s are offbeat, ironic-to-meaningless, giving little or no hint of what the music is “about.” Alkan stretches and expands the piano’s capability at every opportunity, to the point of sometimes providing alternative staves for pianos of lesser range (at a time when the number of keys was not yet standardized); Satie stretches not so much the instrument and technique as the expressive possibilities of pianism and the intellectual/emotional experiential requirements of listeners. Christina Bjørkøe’s unending sensitivity to the unique and sometimes strange elements of Satie’s music makes her exploration of 27 miniatures on an OUR Recordings CD a thoroughly engaging experience. The selection and arrangement of the works appears entirely arbitrary – for example, the Six pieces de la période are all presented, but as numbers 3, 8, 16, 20, 22 and 23 on the disc; and any sense of chronology is absent – for example, Préludes I-III are the earliest works on the CD (1888-1892) but are the last three pieces that Bjørkøe plays. In the case of Satie, though, none of this matters very much, since his unique and highly personal style did not so much evolve as effloresce: he wrote these little pieces as he wished, when he wished, and while there are certainly differences among them, those are not so much stylistically developmental as they are emotive. This CD stands as an excellent hour-long sampler of Satie’s work, quite suitable no matter how much or how little of his oeuvre a listener already happens to know. And of course the disc is sprinkled with works bearing the odd, sometimes dada-esque titles that Satie favored, some of which translate as An Unpleasant Example, Effrontery, Airs for Scaring Away, His Glasses, Cold Dreaming, Canine Prelude, and Pleasant Despair. Seeking direct connections between those titles and the music is a fool’s errand, which is part of the Satie sensibility: as direct and formidably difficult as Alkan’s piano music is, Satie’s is as moody, difficult to capture (although captivating), mild on the surface but always hinting that it possesses depths that remain tantalizingly out of reach of performer and audience alike. It is very much to Bjørkøe’s credit that she appears thoroughly to appreciate each of the miniature sound worlds tone-painted in these small, frequently odd, always expressive little works. Each piece pulls a listener into a difficult-to-pin down “ear space” that hints at becoming comprehensible just as the music ends – giving Bjørkøe the chance to open the next door to another shimmering landscape whose blurry emotional edges are as distant in one direction as Alkan’s distinctively blatant intensity is in the opposite one.