Alkan's Grandes Etudes are certainly grandes (they play for close on 40 minutes) and although they are early works (the opus number is quite misleading) they are already, in a couple of ways at least, typical of him. The extravagant demands that they make of both pianist and piano must have seemed insanely bizarre in the late 1830s (there is no record of any public performance until the present century) while their megalomaniac and disproportionate dimensions will have ensured that anyone picking up the printed copy out of curiosity would soon have put it down again. A pile-driving 11-minute fantaisie for the left hand alone is followed by another more than twice as long (prelude, variations and finale) for the right hand, and by a third for both hands whose hair-raising difficulty amply makes up for its comparative (not much more than five minutes) brevity. The more concise Etudes de bra voure are earlier still (Alkan was 24 when he wrote them) but no less filled with pugnacious technical challenges.
The inventive pianism of all these pieces, and Ronald Smith's prodigiously resourceful response to it, are almost sufficient on their own to sustain a virtuosity-fancier's interest throughout, but that quality of Alkan's best music that keeps the nonspedalist listening is as yet only intermittently present. There is an agreeable touch of characteristic grotesquerie in the main section of the First Grande Etude, and a degree of boldness to its introduction, but both are soon draped in rather emptily showy florid ornament. The same happens to the quite freshly lyrical subject of the Second Grande Etude's variations, while in the introduction and finale here the melodic ideas themselves are sentimentally drawing-room-y. The shortest of the Grandes Etudes (a rapidly accelerating alternation of hurtling toccata—hands in parallel two octaves apart—and a contrasting, more ballad-like idea) is the most musically interesting. Significantly, perhaps, there is rather more of Alkan's individual quiddity in the more tightly structured Etudes de bravoure: the martial waltz-toccata of No. 1 is interrupted by an arrestingly odd evocation of bells, while No. 3 is wildly turbulent, filled with violent rhythmic contradictions.
Even so, the best music on these two CDs is the Sonatine in Bernard Ringeissen's reissued collection (Ronald Smith made a fine recording of it himself some years ago): its first movement is furiously inventive while the lyricism of its second is all the more eloquent for eschewing virtuosity. Zorcico is attractive, too (a slow and languorously melancholy dance in 5 / 4) and if some of the other pieces are over-extended or fall into a patch or two of Alkan's no less characteristic heavyfistedness, the Barcarolle is charmingly delicate, the brief and startlingly dissonant Gigue is at least striking and some of the others will bear repeated if occasional listening. Ringeissen is a less flamboyant virtuoso than Smith, but a fine and discriminating technician, and Harmonia Mundi's 17-year-old recording is scarcely less satisfying than EMI's. Smith's recital is for the already bitten Alkan enthusiast panting for more Ringeissen's for the enquiring newcomer.'