Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 3: I. Allegro con brio (Arr. Charles-Valentin Alkan)

Alkan transcribed the first movement of Beethoven’s C minor Concerto in 1859. The vast cadenza he wrote for it, replacing Beethoven’s own, is extraordinary. The English Alkan scholar and pianist Ronald Smith calls it ‘seismic’. Bravely, Busoni programmed it in the ninth of his twelve Berlin orchestral concerts (Beethoven-Saal, 8 November 1906), though whether he played it himself is unclear. Smith claims he did. Edward J Dent, however, in Appendix III of his classic Busoni biography (1933), names Rudolph Ganz (to whom Ravel dedicated 'Scarbo') as ‘solo pianoforte’. In vintage Beethoven spirit, it has nothing to do with (Mozartean) cadential prolongation but everything to do with symphonic development, its eight sections expanding and projecting their source material through a theatrically weighted ‘continuum of far-flung tonal relationships’ (Smith). In the sense that Hummel’s or Britten’s Mozart cadenzas are unmistakably Hummelian, Brittenesque experiences, so Alkan’s Beethoven is unquestioningly Alkanesque: the personality, thrust and texture, the peculiar Franco-German synthesis, cannot be the work of anyone else. When the music blazes into C major fortissimo with a maggiore version of the Concerto’s opening subject thundered out in the left hand, counterpointed against the marcia finale of the Fifth Symphony a trinity of octaves away in the right, the effect is cataclysmic, the audacity belief-defying (14:33). Transcription, wrote Alkan in 1847, ‘lies in making everything heard, knowing which parts to bring out and how to do it, and also how they should be accompanied, lit up or left in the dark; an art, perhaps, with a richer future than might at first seem possible’.
(Ateş Orga)

11:33 - Cadenza

Composed in 1800, transcribed in 1859. 'Symphony No. 5, Op. 67' composed in 1808.

pf: Marc-André Hamelin

original audio:    • Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor...