Album review Joseph Nolan: The Complete Alkan Organ Works, Volume One – Full of Semi-Orchestral Colors | classical music

CHarles Valentin Alkan was undoubtedly one of the greatest composers of his time. Chopin, his friend and next-door neighbour, was an ardent admirer, while Liszt cited Alkan as the only person in whose presence he felt nervous during a performance. Many of his keyboard works are very difficult to play, yet they are all immaculately designed. However, his music stubbornly refused to enter the mainstream.

Joseph Nolan, who recorded Alkan’s complete works for organ, is convinced of his genius, and compares the music to the song “Widor on steroids”. Listening to this first volume, played on the stunning organ of the Église Saint Martin in Dudelange, Luxembourg, seems an apt description. Not only does Nolan’s playing display death-defying virtuosity, but the Signum’s rich, expansive recording ensures that even the most massive speaker systems are put through its paces.

Much of this first volume was given over to the 11 kaleidoscopic Grands Préludes and one version of Handel’s Messiah. They are extraordinary – and extraordinarily complex – works, full of harmonic movements and quirks and seething with quasi-orchestral colours. Nolan’s imaginative palette choices here are a delight, his thunderous instrument roaring with operatic madness one minute before descending to a piano whisper the next. Experience the Fourth Overture with its playful melody, or the sublimity of Bruckner’s Ninth, or the Bacchanal Tenth, which exudes a strange whiff of the grotesque.

The concert ends with Alkan’s majestic improvisation of Luther’s The Great Fortress Is Our God. It’s a veritable Everest of the organ repertoire, given a towering workout by the indefatigable Nolan.

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