While nineteenth century Parisian social and musical life revolved around the opera, a small but avid elite cultivated chamber music, making the works of Mozart, Haydn, Spohr, Beethoven, Schubert, and many now-forgotten composers from beyond the Rhine, known to a select, almost underground, audience. Alkan was very much a part of this closeted but spirited scene, forming a trio with violinist Delphin Alard -- two years younger and already a rising star -- and cellist Auguste Franchomme, the future dedicatee of Chopin's cello sonata. Franchomme and Alard were to establish an annual series of string quartet performances drawn from the German masters. And while the programs and specific occasions are difficult to identify at this date, Alkan is known to have participated with them in chamber music séances through the early 1830s, from his middle to late teens. In this way, the works and formal usages of the Classical masters, wer absorbed by Alkan during his formative years. This experience manifested itself both in the formal balance and striking innovation of his mature works. While precise dating is problematic, the first of Alkan's mature chamber works seems to have been the piano trio, composed around 1840 and published by Richault the following year with a dedication to James Odier, to whom his 1857 Sonate de Concert for piano and cello is also inscribed. The Trio's busily compact first movement opens with an abrupt motif, foreshadowing the notorious brusquerie of Albéric Magnard, only partially relieved by a brief breath of lyricism. These slight elements lead to a notably terse, grippingly intense argument rounded by a recapitulation telescoping both. The great Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich justly and memorably described the second movement Très vite as possessing "Mendelssohn's lightness, Beethoven's truculence, and Haydn's rhythmic fantasy." A Lentement third movement offers one of Alkan's eldritch essays, an extended dialogue between the declamatory piano and placating strings that eventually mollify the piano's adamant rhetoric to a reluctant acceptance. The final Vite movement accelerates the discussion, with a didactic figure in the strings met by the piano's furious passage work until, after a brief pause, the piano rather unconvincingly adopts the motif in a suddenly sprung coda. Looming from Alkan's first retreat from the concert stage, the Trio wears an aura of the discontent of new vinegary wine in old Classical bottles. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
