Whether or not the Toccatina was Alkan's last finished composition -- it vies for the honor with the grotesque Bombardo-carillon for four feet on a pédalier pedal-board and the final, enigmatic Barcarolle of the Recueil de Chants 5 -- it is the end of the road for Alkan's catalog and a fitting farewell. Its publication by Richault, about 1872, as Op. 75 brings up the questions of uncertain dating and misleading opus numbers bedeviling that catalog. Op. 74, for instance, is Les Mois, comprising the Morceaux (6) caractéristiques of 1838 rounded off with a further six "seasonal" pieces and published together about 1840, while Op. 76 covers the Grandes études (3) for the hands separately and together published about 1839. Several disparate works share the same opus number -- the Marche triomphale and Le chemin de fer are both called Op. 27. And there are some 20 unfilled opus numbers representing either lost works or confusion. And very little manuscript material has been discovered to confirm dates of composition, usually assumed to immediately precede publication. In any case, Alkan as Prospero does not have the creatures of his fancy "vanish into air, into thin air," nor does he strike the valedictory note. Rather, the old magician is up to his characteristic tricks in an eerily coruscating two-part invention in C minor racing along at a Quasi-Prestissimo -- Toujours, sans nuances aucunes -- to suddenly divagate into A flat major and acquire, for two bars, a third voice underlining an ongoing harmonic uncertainty, escalating forte, to resolve, at last, after a rush in contrary motion, with both hands on a rinforzando middle C. It is the sort of virile assertion one finds in the concluding Saltarelle of the Sonate de Concert for piano and cello (and something of a shock after the mystical fervor of its preceding Adagio) or the stupendous fugue capping the Impromptu sur le Choral de Luther, Op. 69, for pédalier, but realized with the sparest of means, composed (as Berlioz said of Béatrice et Bénédict) with the point of a needle. Alkan's Toccatina is, perhaps, the knottiest piece of its sort before Busoni's late, great tripartite Toccata, the concluding Ciaconna of which it anticipates. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
