Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) was a French composer and pianist, living in Paris for virtually his entire life. During the 1830s and 1840s he was considered on of the leading virtuoso pianists in the city, performing alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt

His performing career was punctuated with long withdrawals from public performance, and from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing to compose. During this period he published, amongst other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys (Op. 35) and all the minor keys (Op. 39). The latter includes his Symphony for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 4–7) and Concerto for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 8–10) which are often considered among his masterpieces and are of great musical and technical complexity. Alkan emerged from his self-imposed retirement in the 1870s to give a series of recitals that were attended by a new generation of French musicians. Many of his pieces are huge in scale, yet he also wrote some beautiful miniatures. Alkan is a figure who desreves ro be much more widely known, but thanks to pianists such as Marc Andre Hamelin, Ronald Smith Laurent Martin and others, he is finally beginning to get the recognition his genius deserves. Here is a performace of his Saltarelle op,23