Where I Am Located
For anyone interested in piano lessons for themselves or their children, I am located at 37 Kings Copse Road, Hedge End, SO30 0PQ, which is situated just a couple of hundred yards from Kings Copse Primary School, Hedge End (along the same road) and also about a quarter of a mile from Freegrounds Infant and Primary Schools. I teach on a Bechstein Model B -almost 7 ft long which produces a quite glorious sound.
Alkan- Scherzo Focoso
This is a wonderful performance of a very rare and extremely difficult Alkan scherzo.
More from Alkan -the Symphony for solo Piano
If the Saltarelle is a light virtuosic piece, the Symphony for solo piano show's Alkan's "orchestral" textures which pervade quite a few of his large scale works. We dont hear these type of pieces very often in provincial cities like Southampton or Portsmouth, but there are pianists who play them now and again.
An Introduction to Chopin's Neighbour
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