Charles-Valentin Alkan

Who was Charles-Valentin Alkan?

Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading virtuoso pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.

Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions, virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys and all the minor keys. The latter includes his Symphony for Solo Piano and Concerto for Solo Piano, which are often considered among his masterpieces and are of great musical and technical complexity.