Alkan: 12 Etudes, Op.39 [Box set]

This is an excellent find for the newcomer to Alkan. As well as the complete minor key etudes, there are a selection of great other pieces (seach 'allegro barbaro gibbons' on youtube - that's on here) that really round off the collection.

The piano sound is fairly bright, but that is a good thing here; the strings of fast staccato notes come across very clearly. Sound quality is excellent.

I still prefer the solo concerto by Hamelin, but this is a better value selection, and is simply brilliant, really.

It's very difficult to compete with Marc-Andre Hamelin in the music of Alkan, but Jack Gibbons is every bit his illustrious colleague's equal. As far as complete sets of the Etudes op. 39 go, this is the best. In individual pieces, it's fascinating to compare Gibbons to Hamelin. Both have mastered the stupendous technical difficulty of the pieces, but where Hamelin is often cool and unruffled, Gibbons is mercurial and impulsive. The differences in approach benefit different pieces. In the Concerto for solo piano, I prefer Hamelin's tighter control of the sprawling structure to Gibbons's more impressionable response to each individual episode.

In the more compact Symphony for solo piano, on the other hand, it seems to me that Gibbons is the one who gets to the heart of the piece, despite Hamelin's effortless virtuosity. If you don't know Alkan's piano music, this set is the ideal introduction given its quality and value for money. From then on, you can supplement with Hamelin's Les Quatre Ages CD and Steven Osborne's Esquisses (and Hamelin's stupendous Concerto for solo piano for a more cogent alternate version), and you're all set for one of the most individual and fascinating voices of the Romantic piano repertoire.

More of the music of my best discovery of 2010 so far, Charles Valentine Alkan. Alkan is the other great 19th Century composer-pianist, whose reticence and hyper-sensitivity denied him his justly deserved portion of the fame and glory enjoyed by Liszt, and Alkan's dear friend and next door neighbour, Frederic Chopin. Fortunately, his reputation is steadily being salvaged over recent decades by a dedicated elite of virtuosi, with the dexterity and incredible stamina demanded by his hugely formidable and monumental scores. I am not aware of any other composer for the piano whose work insists upon such sustained peaks of virtuosity over such extended periods. Indeed, in terms of sheer notes played per unit cost there can be few discs to rival these as a value proposition. Still, do not infer from this that Alkan's music is just about virtuosity for its own sake. No, that virtuosity must be placed in the humble service of music of the most intense and thrilling excitement and which must draw from an emotional palette of immense wealth and depth.

As far as I can tell, it is only with this pair of discs that we can get to hear a complete performance of Alkan's epic magnum opus, Etudes for the Twelve Minor Keys, Op.39 (1857). Running at over 2 hours in length it includes Alkan's Symphony for Solo Piano, etudes 4-7, and his mighty Concerto for solo piano, etudes 8-10, which other fine pianists have given to us as extracts. Amongst its other delights are No.12, Le Festin d'Esope, which must be the meanest set of variations on Bah-Bah Black-Sheep, or at least something very like it, one is ever likely to hear.

The pianist here is the literally indestructible Jack Gibbons. A man who has fought his way back from a near-fatal car accident, having been told he will never play again, to give us these astonishing performances of what must be among the smallest handful of toughest works in the whole literature. Gibbons does not play with quite the reckless and dashing abandon of the other great Alkan interpreter of our time, Marc Andre Hamelin. But Gibbons playing is that of a man engaged in a heroic struggle with his furthest limitations, and winning, which of course has an electrifying excitement all its own. His tone is gloriously beautiful, a sparkling blend of brilliant diamonds with sunlight on rippling water.

Gibbons rounds off the set with a handful of choice miniatures taken from other Alkan works, that show some of the more delicate and subtle facets of the composer's musical character. The notes include extracts from a highly informative, and rather moving essay on Alkan's life and character, that can be found in the Writings section of Gibbons own web-site, at which several complete movements from the discs can also be sampled.

Alkan's music stands as a fabulous missing link, halfway between Beethoven at his wildest and Debussy at his most sublime, for whom Alkan was a significant influence. All true lovers of the greatest piano music who have yet to encounter Alkan should take steps to remedy this deficit in their acquaintance at the earliest opportunity. If trying to choose between Gibbons and Hamelin then there is no choice, you have to hear both. But the near negligible price of this set makes this, at the time of writing, a no-brainer.