Alkan Recueils de Chants – Stephanie McCallum

Nobody goes to a dinner party expecting to meet the most interesting person in the room hiding behind the coat rack, and for more than a century that is roughly where Alkan’s Recueils de chants have stood in the piano repertoire — just offstage, overshadowed by his own reputation as the composer of finger-crushing gargantuism, the “Berlioz of the piano” as Hans von Bülow called him, not entirely as a compliment.

But these songs without words — and Alkan clearly wants us to hear Mendelssohn’s example ringing in the title — are a different animal altogether. Modest of scale, generous of feeling, occasionally sly. Stephanie McCallum, who has lived inside this composer’s strange and lonely aesthetic world for the better part of three decades now, plays them here with the unhurried confidence of someone who long ago stopped needing to prove anything about Alkan’s virtuosity and can simply attend to the music’s inner life.

That inner life turns out to be tender, almost confiding. The opening piece of the Premier recueil, op. 38, unfolds with a songful line that could almost be an outtake from Mendelssohn’s own set — until an odd harmonic sidestep reminds you whose pen this really is. McCallum’s tempo here sits a shade under what the marking “vivement” might suggest; I found myself wanting a touch more forward motion, a little more air under the phrase. It is a small quibble, and reasonable people will disagree — Alkan’s markings are notoriously personal, almost private jokes with himself, and there is no single correct clock speed for this music.

Where she is unimpeachable — and this is worth dwelling on — is in the third pieces of each set, which Alkan variously labels Chant, Choeur, or Canon. These are canonic textures of real contrapuntal cunning dressed up as salon miniatures, and McCallum finds exactly the right touch: light enough to breathe, clear enough that you can trace each entrance without the texture congealing into mush. The dog’s bark that punctuates the Chant of Book I she renders with real wit, a little dry snap in the articulation rather than a cartoonish yelp. The bell-like sonorities of the following piece shimmer with genuine pedaling finesse — you can hear individual overtones decay rather than blur into a wash.

The Deuxième recueil, sharing both opus number and year with the first — 1857, a period when Alkan had already begun his long retreat from public interpretation — opens with a harp-imitation eclogue of considerable tenderness, hymnlike, almost devotional. Then comes an Allegretto that shows Alkan’s more cussed, four-square side, and a Chant de guerre that gestures backward toward the martial keyboard rhetoric of the post-Napoleonic salon — though blessedly without the sledgehammer literalism that genre usually invited. McCallum brings a certain knowing irony to it, as though she is quoting the style rather than endorsing it. The fourth piece, marked to evoke a candlelit procession according to the annotator, comes across under her fingers as more astringent than flickering — mordant rather than soft-focus. I am not sure the composer would have minded; Alkan rarely trusted comfort for its own sake.

The Troisième recueil, op. 65, dating from around 1859, gets a reading that is warm and idiomatic without straining after effect. Here comparison becomes unavoidable: Marc-André Hamelin recorded this same book for Hyperion, and where McCallum sings, Hamelin snipes — his is playing of coiled, glittering aggression, an Alkan for the shooting gallery, dazzling in its precision but sometimes airless. McCallum’s approach trades adrenaline for songfulness. Neither is wrong. They are, in fact, complementary — Hamelin the gunslinger, McCallum the storyteller — and anyone serious about this repertoire will eventually want both on the shelf.

The genuine find here is Une fusée, op. 55, appearing on disc for what is claimed to be the first time — and it is a small marvel, a spinning perpetuum mobile of arpeggios that catches fire exactly as its title promises. McCallum tosses it off with a glinting, unforced brilliance; the piece never feels effortful even as the figuration churns beneath a singing top line. It is worth the price of admission on its own, frankly, a genuine rediscovery rather than a scholarly footnote.

Sound engineering is close but not claustrophobic, capturing the particular knock and ring of what sounds like a well-regulated modern grand rather than anything softer-grained. Whether this project — announced as the first installment of a complete traversal of all five books — fulfills its early promise remains to be heard. On this evidence, though, McCallum belongs among the composer’s most sympathetic modern advocates, and this disc deserves a place well up front, not shoved behind the coats anymore.