Composers: Curiosity Piece

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If ever there were two forgotten men of music, they are Raymond Lewenthal and Charles-Valentin Alkan. Lewenthal is a 42-year-old American pianist. Alkan was a French composer who died in 1888. Each in his own way is some thing of a curiosity piece. Together they constitute one of the most incredible melodramas in musical history. And as a result of what Lewenthal is doing for Alkan — and Alkan for Lewenthal — both are likely to become famous as well.

For reasons he himself finds hard to explain, Lewenthal decided five years ago to study the neglected music of Alkan. Convinced that the composer "really had something to communicate," he presented his first all-Alkan recital in Manhattan in 1963. That led to an RCA Victor recording, released last summer. To the industry's surprise, the Alkan album took off and hovered among the top bestselling classical recordings for more than five months.

But who was Alkan?

Apes & Cockatoos. He was a concert pianist, an intimate friend of Chopin and Liszt, and one of the finest post-Beethoven composers for piano. He was known as the Berlioz of the piano. His music reflected none of the warm rhapsodical reveries of Chopin and Liszt but, rather, foreshadowed Mahler and Bruckner. A moody, eccentric loner, Alkan retired from public life at 42 to study the Talmud, teach, and compose. One of the pieces he composed, curiously enough, was a funeral march for a parakeet.

When he returned to the concert stage 18 years later, Alkan inexplicably refused to play any of his important works. So did his illegitimate son, Elie Miriam Delaborde, himself a distinguished pianist, who inherited his father's idiosyncrasies: he roomed with two apes and traveled with 121 cockatoos.

Denied a hearing, Alkan's music remained virtually unplayed for more than a century. Part of the reason pianists steered clear of him was that his works were so fiendishly difficult to play. A frustrated orchestral composer, he favored great chordal eruptions of thick, textured sound. In his imaginative Symphonic for Piano, for example, a splintered melodic line is surrounded by raging harmonies almost demonic in their intensity. The final two movements are the volcanic outpourings of a man possessed. Schumann, viewing one of Alkan's note-heavy scores, declared it "black on black."