Published by Richault in 1857, the Petites Fantaisies (3) are part of that astounding crescendo of compositions -- miniatures and monuments -- pouring forth from the late 1840s through the 1850s, and on into the mid-1860s, during which Alkan's style attained its ripest, most polished, most expansive, yet most inventively concentrated form. Where the usual grandes fantaisies of his day amounted to no more than facile variations on popular, usually operatic, melodies, Alkan's are rife with genuine fantastication and petite only in length, playing around six minutes each. The first opens with the arresting gesture of a master raconteur leading to a heraldic quasi-scherzando episode suggesting legendary times and deeds of chivalry, soon in tandem with a lyrical complement that the listener probably won't be wrong in taking to signify la femme. A brief inquieto development rises the accelerando to a tense climax before the raconteur's motif returns, as if to say "Yes, that's how it was!" A final page of pianissimo chords spread over the keyboard breathes a benediction. The third Fantaisie begins in medias res,, with a repeated, nervously giddy motif not to be quieted by a cantabile chorale over a throbbing bass breaking out in octaves with the assertion of hunting horns. The chase is on in a coruscating development of relentlessly gripping richness, fading away to end with a sudden triple forte chord at the keyboard's extremities. Between these wordless, quasi-operatic, or cinematic scenes, the second Fantaisie and most teasing of the three innocuously begins with a rocking, faux naïf oddment recalling Alkan's foremost expositor Ronald Smith to the Allegro vivace of Beethoven's Sonata in G, Op. 31/1. Listeners familiar with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots may well hear in it an allusion to the rollicking melody of its first big number, the chorus "Bonheur de la table." Alkan thought highly enough of Meyerbeer to have arranged the overture to his Le prophète for piano, four hands, though it is one of the quirks in the Alkanistic quiddity that he was not above guying his idols. Interrupted by furious salvos of sixteenth notes, the ingenuous little melody modulates to increasingly sophisticated tonal terrain as it's transformed in beguiling lyricism and worked to a vehement climax before fading into dolcissimo and smorzando. If this is, indeed, a spinoff from Les Huguenots, it is an operatic fantasy of a different sort, divagating into Alkanic regions of satire, transmogrification, and enigma. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
