Concerto for Solo Piano (Alkan)

The pianist Jack Gibbons comments: "The style and form of the music take on a monumental quality—rich, thickly set textures and harmonies ... conjure up the sound world of a whole orchestra and tax the performer, both physically and mentally, to the limit.

[2] Adrian Corleonis considers the Concerto to represent the most cruelly taxing piano work before the time of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and Ferruccio Busoni.

Performance demands tremendous physical endurance, and great technical skills to cover features including arpeggios, octave runs, scales, leaps, grace notes, alternating hands, swiftly changing block chord motifs, tremolos, and trills executed by the fourth and fifth fingers with the melody played on the same hand.

The second movement is "a profoundly moving and expressive Adagio that builds to a powerful funeral central section presaging the sound-world of Mahler[3]".

A first version was made in 1872 (the ms. is now in the library of the Royal College of Music in London), and was apparently submitted to Alkan himself shortly before the latter's death, having already been approved by Hans von Bülow.

Other attempts at orchestrating the Concerto were made by Alkan's possible son Élie-Miriam Delaborde and by the American composer Mark Starr.

[a] There are now a number of recordings of the work; notable ones include those by Jack Gibbons, Marc-André Hamelin, John Ogdon, Mark Latimer, Ronald Smith, Stephanie McCallum, Vincenzo Maltempo and Stéphanie Elbaz.