KEY POINTS:
A few years ago, I had the misfortune to pull a bookcase down on top of myself. Scrambling out from under a chaos of potentially lethal hardbacks, I thought how fortunate I had been surviving the fate of Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) who brought on his demise by reaching for a top-shelf volume of the Talmud.
This reclusive French pianist, composer and eccentric was a contemporary of Liszt and Wagner and a maverick whose astonishing music took his instrument to its outer limits. Little wonder that Busoni hailed him as the "Berlioz of the Piano".
Marc-Andre Hamelin, in his new Hyperion CD, is not the first pianist to take on Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano - in fact he first recorded it 15 years ago. Running at almost 50 minutes, with the opening Allegro assai clocking in at 28'14", it is a work of almost superhuman demands.
But then this Canadian has proved before that he is indeed the Clark Kent of pianists, riding through Alkan's monumental one-man concerto with the flair of a champion rally driver.
The first movement (helpfully outlined, with timings, by Jeremy Nicholas in his programme notes) is a mesmerising journey - as long as the whole of Liszt's B minor Sonata. Hamelin surmounts challenge after challenge, from cascades of chords to pages of AK47-style repeated notes.
Hamelin aims for resonance and atmosphere in the slow movement, where Chopinesque lyricism is brusquely interrupted by sounds from the dark side. In the Finale, a manic polonaise with Arabian trimmings, one wonders whether one is listening to a man or a diabolic machine.
The disc is completed by the six pieces of Alkan's Opus 65 Chants. Inspired by Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, they slyly deconstruct the sometimes deadly blandness of the earlier composer, with goblins and little demon folk infiltrating the Mendelssohnian fairy band.
The final Barcarolle is perhaps Alkan's best-known piece, with its bluesy sevenths and swaying chromaticisms. This too is a revisiting for Hamelin, as it turns up on his 1995 recording of Alkan's Grand Sonata, and the passing of 12 years has made its song even sweeter.
* Alkan, Concerto for Solo Piano (Hyperion CDA 67569, through Ode Records)
