Despite its misleadingly high opus number, Alkan's collection Les Mois (The Months), was published in 1840 (that is, in his twenty-seventh year) and initiates the alternation of exquisite miniatures and daunting monuments by which his career would proceed. Although the longest of these dozen pieces -- one for each month -- plays around four-and-a-half minutes, they share a pithiness, or (as in the starry evocation of "Une Nuit d'été") a redolence, winged with tidings of a novel, often Gothic, world unique in music. Beginning with the bleak snowscape of "Une Nuit d'hiver," set off by distant bells, Alkan essays unabashed pictorial effects which revel in the grotesque -- for instance, the graphic death throes of "Le Mourant" ("the dying man") and the foul weather of "Gros temps." The revels of "Carnaval," on the other hand, come laced with the pungent bizarrerie of what Alkan scholar and pianist Ronald Smith calls a "double octave acciaccatura, an invention of Alkan's played glissando from black note to white." If "La Retraite" seems to recall, with a kind of nostalgia, the soldiers' exit in Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust (composed several years later), its raucous twin "L'Hallali" ("the bugle call"), visits a salvo of satire upon a similar scene. In "L'Opéra," satire reaches its apogee in a brilliant but all-too-brief take-off on operatic high-jinx. Yet, side by side with a taste for parody and the grotesque, Alkan evinces moments of innocent charm, as in "Les Moissoneurs" ("the reapers") or "La Pâque" ("Passover") or the flirtatious "Sérénade," and a sudden apparition of the purest poetry in "Promenade sur l'eau." Etched with unfailing mastery, these small pieces forecast the disconcerting variety which would characterize Alkan's work in even more concise or enigmatic guises, and of which this little-known but delectable collection affords an undisguised glimpse.
(allmusic.com)
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Original audio: • Alkan - Les Mois, Op. ...
Original sheet music: imslp.org