Why nobody writes music like Chopin anymore

[lukeottevanger]

Alkan's are infinitely more clunkier then Chopin.

I prefer 'a greater proportion are clunkier' - when he's on top form, there are no clunks in sight!

Perhaps, but i think it's only fair to warn people about what they are getting into. After all, i'm the self-proclaimed boor of GMG, i have an image of negativity to maintain!

And I admire your diligence....

Alkan was a superior craftsman, but not a genius. The distinction is important enough to stress, at least as far as i'm concerned. Others may decide not to care.

No, I can't quite agree. Depends on your definition of genius, but Alkan fits mine, and there's certainly more to him than simply fine craftsmanship - otherwise we'd be able to point to composers who are stylistically similar to him, and I can't do that. Like Chopin, he created an entirely new way of writing for piano, in his case one totally unenvisaged by anyone else and, unlike Chopin's, one so avant-garde in nature that it was not really attempted by anyone else for at least another 100 years. Yes, it's a narrow vein that he discovered, but it's a really potent one - it takes genius of a sort to see it for the first time, though, I am sure.

I will certainly agree though, that one needs to exercise some caution in one's first Alkan purchases. Op 39 is the best place to start, especially the Concerto and the Symphony; the Grande Sonata, the op 16 Etudes and the Sonatina are others. I'd point listeners towards the violin sonata too...

[Joe_Campbell]

Well, Luke, if JdP was to acknowledge that Alkan was a genius, then he'd have to love him! You see what is on the line?

[mn dave]

I will certainly agree though, that one needs to exercise some caution in one's first Alkan purchases. Op 39 is the best place to start, especially the Concerto and the Symphony; the Grande Sonata, the op 16 Etudes and the Sonatina are others. I'd point listeners towards the violin sonata too...

I have the op. 35s. I bought them based on sound samples and I couldn't be happier. And, yes, I need more.

[orbital]

I own the complete set by Jack Gibbons which is ok, but i generally prefer the one by Ronald Smith, though it isn't complete.

It is complete. One CD that has the rest of Op.39 is a bit hard to find though.

-
Luke, have you listened to Latimer's live recording of the Concerto? It is live, so it is bound to have some mistakes, but your point for Hamelin works here to an even larger extent, and it may be my favorite recording of the piece -despite the despicable sound. 

[(poco) Sforzando]

After all, i'm the self-proclaimed boor of GMG, i have an image of negativity to maintain!

And you do it frightfully well.

[lukeottevanger]

Luke, have you listened to Latimer's live recording of the Concerto? It is live, so it is bound to have some mistakes, but your point for Hamelin works here to an even larger extent, and it may be my favorite recording of the piece -despite the despicable sound. 

No, but I'd be very interested to! This is a work that needs a few mistakes, I think, for its monumental ambition and the strain imposed on the pianist to impress as it ought.




(Or that's how I justify my own attempts at playing it, anyway..... )

[Florestan]

Great post, thanks!

Seconded.

Thirded. 

[lukeottevanger]

I'm going to have to disagree with Luke on some of his comments. Alkan's virtuosity does become gratuitous every so often and his inspiration is very uneven, often even pedestrian.

Just wanted to emphasize a line from what I said last night, in the post to which Josquin was responding with the above. It was getting late by the time I started chatting with him, so I failed to remember exactly what I myself had written, but FWIW I did say intially, but with new italics for emphasis:

Alkan at his best doesn't use virtuosity for its own sake (or not only that, at any rate)

Not that it matters.

[lukeottevanger]

Now for a bit of self-correction: Talking about Scriabin's use of extreme performance indications, I said

...somehow his music almost always lives up to them. I'm reminded of Wilfrid Mellers talking about Edward MacDowell, a composer with a similar propensity for strewing extravagant Italian adjectives over his scores, but with in his case a great disjunction between the word and the music: as Mellers says about MacDowell's 'On an Old Pine Tree', you don't make a piece impressive by labeling it 'Impressivo'!  Mellers didn't have much time for Scriabin at all, but evidently he never doubted that the music is able to live up to its labeling in this respect at least.

I remembered wrongly:

...the heat of Scriabin's narcissism now leaves us cold. We are suspicious of a composer who tells us he is celestially voluptuous. He knows when he is voluptuous, no doubt; but what about the other part? We have more repsect for Debussy, who wrote celestially voluptuous music if ever any man did: "Vous avez été au ciel, M. Debussy?" "Oui, mais j'en cause jamais avec les étrangers.

Mellers sounds about as harsh on Scriabin in the chapter I quote as he does on anyone, but it should be remembered that a special feature of Mellers' writing is that every word must be taken absolutely literally - he is very much a man of capital-C Concepts, and his language is precisely measured. So when he says 'Scriabin leaves us cold' he means more than 'Scriabin's music is unimpressive' or 'Scriabin is a poor composer', which is how we may otherwise read this passage. Elsewhere he leaves us in no doubt that though for him Scriabin is a perverse figure, he is also a minor master - 'a man of exquisite sensibility who went crazy: by turns silly, pathetic, horrifying, a portent of Europe's sickness.' Mellers means what he says, very precisely, so it's best to read carefully and not to be offended by it. He usually turns out to be right, even if his judgements are sometimes uncomfortable!

[Josquin des Prez]

Well, Luke, if JdP was to acknowledge that Alkan was a genius, then he'd have to love him! You see what is on the line?

Well, you don't have to love somebody to like his music. 

BTW, here's Gibbons offering a great interpretation of the Allegro Barbaro from the Opus 35:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dSqkzsWXlU

Just to show the type of virtuosity required to play this music.

[lukeottevanger]

Thanks for the link! Next to it is a link to Hamelin playing the Concerto first movement, 3 parts. Sound is awful, but this movement specifically is Alkan's single greatest, most audacious and demanding piece (as I said above, it's been called 'the greatest piece in sonata form between Beethoven and Brahms') so it's a must-watch.

http://www.youtube.com/v/OuxcI7nyKl0_Ms

http://www.youtube.com/v/9ZAbiArRFn8_Ms

http://www.youtube.com/v/jOpHGApRwf0_Ms

hmmm, that didn't work - here are the links whilst I try to figure out why


first movement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuxcI7nyKl0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZAbiArRFn8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOpHGApRwf0&feature=related

second movement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2mW8fsnIa4&feature=related

third movement (different performance)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKQO2rRv0VA&feature=related

[lukeottevanger]

Naughty to single out one passage, even a lengthy one, but from about 4 minutes into the third of the first movement clips to the end of the movement is stunning from every perspective. Behind all the ultra-virtuosity there is something mysterious, which we occasionally sense when Alkan cuts away the texture to single, slow, simple notes for a bar or two, even shortly before the end. He's not afraid to use the baldest, even blandest of materials in these tiny-but-immense sections, and it makes the music all the more powerful. Joining at 4 minutes we hear a marvellous passage in which Alkan makes the music appear increasingly vulnerable and unsure by sapping its legato by precisely indicated degrees (the use of increasingly complex rhythmic divisions also helps achieve this psychological effect as, in a much more sophisticated sense, it does in Ferneyhough more than a century later - not the only similarity I detect between the composers). Each new level of articulation is set of by the sudden interpolation of a tiny, mysterious chorale. That's always been a favourite passage of mine. So here articulation and rhythmic complexity (and their virtuoso deployment) are helping to define the form, until (still playing with this dry, staccato articulation but now forte, demonically impetuous) the music lurches suddenly towards the cadenza.

This cadenza is the most incredible thing of all, eventually focusing in upon the utterly extraordinary repeated note passage, the 'eye of the needle' through which the music seems to have to pass before closure is possible. As I pointed out before, the very idea of making the giant mass of notes that is this movement reach its formal, technical and emotional focus on a single line of notes, especially in a cadenza of all places, is audacious, and yet the only 'correct' answer to the problem Alkan sets himself: how do you write a cadenza which seems both qualitatively different and also harder than the surrounding music which is already, patently, as hard as hard can be? If you listen to and watch Hamelin here, you'll see that this repeated note section, unprecedented in the piece until now and clearly something very 'different', is the most contorted, physically demanding part of the music - he makes his most glaring mistakes here too! It manages to stand out from the virtuoso mass of the rest of the music because Alkan is able precisely to weigh up exactly how difficult each part should be and should appear to be. Well, anyway, enough said - just make sure you pick your jaw up off the floor when you've finished listening.

[Joe_Campbell]

YHM, Luke.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I have been watching and listening to Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano.

Astonishing piece (and astonishing playing by Hamelin).

A few stray thoughts -

Alkan's music isn't virtuosic for its own sake. I don't get the feeling the virtuosity is meant for display. Alkan isn't very personal, poetic, or private either (in this piece, at least). His music seems to exemplify pure process, process as a function of the transforming Imagination (yes, in its most Romantic and absolute sense). Imagination is both sublime and demonic, and Alkan is rather frightening, because what he makes audible isn't human. This music isn't preoccupied with expressing any human ego. That explains Alkan's obscurity and impopularity. You can't latch on to the superhuman or inhuman (in its neutral sense). What you get in Alkan is a pure sensation of form, movement, change, speed, colour.

I listened with more than usual attention to the cadenza, Luke. Yes, it is extraordinary for all the reasons you gave.

[Josquin des Prez]

he makes his most glaring mistakes here too!

Probably because he's playing it a bit too fast (but hey, it's live).

I get what you are saying here, all though you seem to attach a lot of technical significance to "mere" expressive devices (the comparison with Ferneyhough seems highly dubious to me). The music comes to an abrupt halt in mid gesture right before the cadenza, as if uncertain where to go from there. After 25+ minutes of crunching virtuosity and all the standard formal developments you'd think anything he could do to end the piece would feel anti-climatic at this point. The "chorale" only accentuates the gravity of what's about to unfold. After this protracted moment, the cadenza begins in the most banal way and then bam, with that demonic and completely unexpected dotted passage, which sounds like a file of soldiers lumbering forward, row after row, in fugato fashion.

It's brilliant, it's hair raising, but still not genius. 

Personally, i think Gibbons gives a better overall interpretation of this passage, all though i still prefer Roland Smith, despite the fact his version is really sluggish (plus what seems to be some missing notes), all because during the reprise of that single line of notes he actually accentuates the fugato effect by changing the color of each additive voice in a way Gibbons doesn't do. One little detail like that and he turns a disadvantage (his slumbering approach) into a victory.

[lukeottevanger]

Probably because he's playing it a bit too fast (but hey, it's live).

although, proportionally, there are still more mistakes here than elsewhere. Trust me - I've played this piece (wildly inacccurately but enough to get a sense of how the level of difficulty waxes and wanes). This is the riskiest, most exposed passage in the whole work, just as it should be. A real killer!

I get what you are saying here, all though you seem to attach a lot of technical significance to "mere" expressive devices (the comparison with Ferneyhough seems highly dubious to me).

That must mean, then, that as you said to James a while back 'then you still don't get it'    What you find odd is that I 'seem to attach a lot of technical significance to "mere" expressive devices'; and what I am saying is precisely that this close and through-going interpenetration of the technical and the expressive is what is odd - and for its time unique - about this music. This is why I find it so interesting; this and its implications are the main reason why I think Alkan is a genius. Johan's previous post was an absolute marvel of fine musical insight and lucid writing. (I can only wish that I could do the same.....  ) He got it dead right: what is peculiar to Alkan is that everything is filtered through formal thinking. Where in Chopin a phrase is striking in its own right - and it therefore has its own inner life and breath - in Alkan even the most the striking phrases are striking because of their formal implications - and therefore are heard as being not so much alive in thmselves as existing within a greater, iron control (possibly 'demonic', in fact). I am constantly wonderstruck when listening to Alkan. His music is as expressively beautiful for me as most other composers. But the wonder and the expressive beauty derive not from the note-to-note detail of the music or the inherent beauty of the musical materials (as they may do in Chopin or in fact everyone else) but from the way these often very basic musical materials and ways of playing creat or interact with the form. Those progressively more staccato phrases leading into the cadenza are a case in point. There is nothing particularly remarkable about them in themselves, but their formal implications are what makes them expressively beautiful. The cadenza itself is another such passage. Alkan isn't alone in being able to do this, of course - every other composer worth his salt does it too. But only Alkan does it almost all the time, without relenting into a passage of free-flowing or rhapsodical expressiveness.

It is in this that I see a link to Ferneyhough, and I don't think it's dubious. It has to be pointed out, I think - no other composer in the previous or intervening years shares with Ferneyhough this ultra-controlling technique, where not just the notes played but their phrasing, articulation and performance difficulty are measured and treated as a compositional parameter. Ferneyhough is quite explicit that this is how he composes - and I've never seen a comparable approach in any previous composer outside Alkan.* There is a reason that Alkan (and not, say, Liszt) is an inspiring genius for quite a few of the avant-garde, and I think this extremely modern approach to his materials is part of it....

The music comes to an abrupt halt in mid gesture right before the cadenza, as if uncertain where to go from there. After 25+ minutes of crunching virtuosity and all the standard formal developments you'd think anything he could do to end the piece would feel anticlimactic at this point. The "chorale" only accentuates the gravity of what's about to unfold. After this protracted moment, the cadenza begins in the most banal way and then bam, with that demonic and completely unexpected dotted passage, which sounds like a file of soldiers lumbering forward, row after row, in fugato fashion.

It's brilliant, it's hair raising, but still not genius. 

I won't rise to that one either! This all depends on your own personal feeling of what 'genius' entails. Personally, I'm very happy to believe that there may have been a good few geniuses in music history - I won't limit myself to just four or five. Alkan fulfils my own personal criteria very easily; but so too would other composers who many here would be more doubtful about. I have no problem with that.

Personally, i think Gibbons gives a better overall interpretation of this passage, all though i still prefer Roland Smith, despite the fact his version is really sluggish (plus what seems to be some missing notes), all because during the reprise of that single line of notes he actually accentuates the fugato effect by changing the color of each additive voice in a way Gibbons doesn't do. One little detail like that and he turns a disadvantage (his slumbering approach) into a victory.

I like Smith a great deal; I haven't heard Gibbons.


*It goes without saying that Alkan's way of working is less complex or determinative than Ferneyhough's, and I don't want to be seen to imply that it is - my comparison of the two composers isn't based on spurious ideas such as 'they're both really complex' or 'they're both really difficult'. Even though Alkan is the first composer to require not merely a virtuoso but a 'super-virtuoso' performer....

[Al Moritz]

Luke and Jezetha,

thank you for your highly interesting posts on Alkan which have greatly wetted my appetite for the composer's music. Aah, so much music, so little time . . .

Al

[Joe_Campbell]

Nothing like a thread about Chopin to whet one's appetite for Alkan!