Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Members Recordings - Pianist Corner A tiny Alkan sketch late at night

No. 34 "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo" (from Esquisses, Op. 63)

Can't sleep, so I might as well do something productive. Google Translate translates the title as "I hate the common crowd and keep my distance." Wikipedia translates it as "I hate the unholy rabble and keep them away," which it attributes to the Roman poet, Horace. Either way, this piece is one of Alkan's many inward-looking miniatures, and it almost peers right into Alkan's heart and soul during his reclusion.

We only have an electric piano in the apartment, but it made do. Also, airplanes fly over constantly, so you'll hear an airplane in the background. I'll redo this for November 30th, along with a slew of other Alkan works.

I hope you enjoy.

Lovely! I feel like playing it too now. It is very deep in its simplicity.
PS: This is the first PW piece I listen to on my new laptop with (finally) good speakers. (Cinnamonbear will be happy I now have good speakers .)

Thanks for commenting. And congratulations on getting a new laptop and speakers!



Yes! This is true with a lot of his short works, I believe. Try some of the "other" barcarolles, like Op. 67 No. 6.

Very nice playing and a piece I enjoyed.

One advantage of these short Alkan works for me is that by definition they can't suffer from my main personal criticism of Alkan...that despite his incredible originality many of his works are about 20% too long.

I sometimes hear that criticism of Schubert, too, pianoloverus, but for both Schubert and Alkan, I am fine with the lengths of their compositions.

More miniatures to come!

Thanks, OSK. Interesting... Last night my old laptop died for good - just when I started using the new one and all was set up. Good timing...
I love Alkan more and more and cannot wait for the big celebration on the 30th of November!

I want to host an e-cital, but gerg hasn't been online since summer of 2012... I could do something myself, though the format wouldn't be the same (or quite as good as what gerg did). It would probably be just collecting a bunch of people's recordings that are sent to me, and I put them all in once place easily viewable for everybody. We'll see, though.

Oh, I uploaded another miniature and posted it in in the Members Recordings forum also, one of my favorite Preludes from Op. 31

And I'm not going to continue making new threads where it takes longer to type the first post than it does to play the piece, so here is my third miniature that I did; probably Alkan's smallest piece. Les Cloches, No. 4 from Esquisses. It sounds like more of just an idea, or musical thought; then again, that's why Alkan called these "sketches."

This is the first Alkan piece I really sit down and listen to (nice and short and simple). I enjoyed it bunches, and I'm now exploring some of his other music -- hopefully picking some to play soon, too.

Thanks for sharing .

Well, thank you for listening! And I encourage you to explore Alkan's music for yourself and find out what you like and what you want to play.

Add one more

Hypnotically beautiful!!
And yeah -- someone had a pretty darn good get with that correction on the youtube page! -- although to tell the truth, I couldn't tell for sure that you didn't do it right, even upon a second hearing. I wasn't motivated to listen a 3rd time to see if it really wasn't right.

I totally misread that rhythm at the very end, hehe. I played it as a siciliano (spelling?) rhythm instead of quarter, dotted-quarter, eighth.

Oops.

Probably the simplest thing to do would just start a thread and people could just add their recordings to it.

Or maybe you could do something using SoundCloud - I'm not completely sure how it works, but I keep seeing stuff that has been uploaded there.

You could probably also create a special box.net account only for the recital and put all recordings that people post or send you there and then share the folder with the recordings (I know it is possible to share a folder, although I have never done it). Or you could create an email address for the occasion (for box.net) and share it with those who want to participate, so they could even upload their recordings themselves.

Very nice. You captured the inwardness, and managed to avoid getting all precious about it - admirable.

Too long!
This piece reminded of movie music for some reason.

Thanks, wr. And I will go with ChopinAddict's first option... Making a box.com (they switched from box.net I guess) account for the e-cital.

OSK, I was listening to Chopin's Polonaise Op.61 in A-flat, and the opening bars sound just like the opening of the chordal section to the Alkan piece. Or maybe I should have written that the other way around :P, but here, listen to 28:17 - 28: 28 and 28:44 in this:

[video:youtube]JTC31nKdfvM[/video]

Yes. I thought about the similarity to the Polonaise-Fantasy when I first heard this Esquisse, too. Good observation!

Nice! I think many or most people won't find any similarity worth mentioning, but I'm with you -- although I don't think there was necessarily any imitation or homage on Alkan's part. (And that's the direction it would be in, because Alkan's piece was written long after the Chopin. BTW, need I say I didn't know that. But you got me interested enough to look it up.)

That's what I think, too. But somewhere, in the back of their head, something will click and say "that sounded awfully familiar for some reason!!"