Special offer. Alkan: Organ Music Volume 2
Kevin Bowyer (organ of Blackburn Cathedral)
Pro Organo, two minutes' worth of harmless and innocent tranquillity, opens this second volume of Kevin Bowyer's Alkan cycle, but it is a false dawn. You have to wait until the final track for...
Special offer. Alkan: Organ Music Volume 2
Kevin Bowyer (organ of Blackburn Cathedral)
Purchase product
Pro Organo, two minutes' worth of harmless and innocent tranquillity, opens this second volume of Kevin Bowyer's Alkan cycle, but it is a false dawn. You have to wait until the final track for...
About
In the last three decades the staggeringly original piano music of Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–88) has emerged from the darkness that had surrounded it over the previous century and today features regularly in recital programmes. But Alkan’s music for organ – much of it initially conceived for the now obsolete pedal-piano – is no less powerful and imaginative, although little of had been recorded before Kevin Bowyer began this survey. His first recording of this repertoire drew ecstatic reviews from the critics; this second instalment (of three) offers music and playing of equal quality.
Contents and tracklist
Alkan:
11 Pieces dans le style religieux et un transcription du Messie de Handel, Op. 72
Work length49:53
Awards and reviews
2010
Pro Organo, two minutes' worth of harmless and innocent tranquillity, opens this second volume of Kevin Bowyer's Alkan cycle, but it is a false dawn. You have to wait until the final track for anything so soothing to crop up again. Everything else is as challenging to the listener as it must be to the performer, but luckily in Bowyer we have a performer who not only guides us through the music with the assurance of one who sees nothing out of the ordinary in Alkan's musical language but who cuts through the immense technical difficulties like a hot knife through butter.
Bowyer's breathtaking footwork in the final six of the Etudes pour les pieds seulement doesn't diminish the slightly circus-like melodrama of these astonishing pieces which range from the tempestuous No 7 to the dark No 11 by way of the jaunty (but, as Malcolm MacDonald's excellent booklet-notes point out, fiendishly difficult) Ninth.
The remainder of the disc is given over to all 12 pieces in Alkan's Op 72, an opus with a typically unambiguously wordy title. Handel informs the first of these, majestically striding along, at once pompous and celebratory, both characteristics (as well as the vivid final echo effects) magnificently highlighted by the regal splendour of Blackburn Cathedral's matchless Walker/Wood, the cathedral's heady acoustic and a superlative recording from Toccata Classics.
There then follows a series of increasingly complex and demanding pieces which, were it not for the amazing intensity of Bowyer's interpretative vision and his wonderful use of organ colour, would prove insurmountably daunting to most listeners. As it is we are treated to some of the most vividly focused and technically fluent organ-playing imaginable.
It seems curious that Alkan rounded his Op 72 off with a simple transcription of the 'Pastoral Symphony' from Messiah. But it turns out to be a stroke of genius, restoring calm after so much, as MacDonald puts it, 'tortured and sardonic' writing.
June 2008
In Bowyer we have a performer who not only guides us through the music with the assurance of one who sees nothing out of the ordinary in Alkan's musical language but who cuts through the immense technical difficulties like a hot knife through butter.
