The piano music of Charles-Valentin Alkan is no longer regarded as the preserve of a handful of zealous specialists. Over the last two decades a whole raft of young pianists have emerged keen to take on the challenges presented by the French composer’s keyboard writing, which is some of the most demanding in 19th-century music. The Piano Classics label has already documented a number of those exceptional performances, most notably in the revelatory series of discs from Vincenzo Maltempo, and now come two further additions to that series. One of them, played by Giovanni Bellucci, is devoted to Alkan’s early works – the three Concerti da Camera Op 10, and the first ever recording of the Six Pieces Op 16. The other, from the young British pianist Mark Viner, is a complete performance of one of his most substantial and remarkable cycles, the 12 Etudes in all the major keys, Op 35.

Alkan's C major Presto​​ tests a pianist’s tremolo ability almost to destruction

First published in 1847, the Etudes follow a sequence of ascending fourths, beginning with the deceptively straightforward Etude in A, and ending with the piece in E. The preludes and studies by Chopin (who was Alkan’s neighbour in Paris in the 1840s) and the first versions of what became Liszt’s Transcendental Studies are the obvious models for some of the piano writing, but Alkan frequently pushes on into territory unknown even to those composers. The C major Presto tests a pianist’s tremolo ability almost to destruction; the F major piece is a ferocious Allegro Barbaro that anticipates Bartók’s work of the same name by more than 60 years; and two other pieces – in E flat and G flat – are built more like descriptive tone poems than studies, though they were composed before Liszt even began his groundbreaking set of symphonic poems.



Viner shows he is an impressively unflappable interpreter of this sometimes extraordinary music. His playing is as beguiling in the lyrical straightforwardness of the A major Etude as it is controlled in the weirdly manic counterpoint of the C sharp piece, or commanding in the bravura explosions that regularly punctuate the cycle. His playing is never showy; he emphasises that these are profound explorations of early romantic sensibility first and extreme technical challenges second, and that is a totally convincing way of dealing with some of the most remarkable piano music of its time.