ABSTRACT
Charles Valentin Alkan's apprentice works are the usual 1820's mixture of bravura, operatic bel canto and decoration. Radical French composers looked towards foreigners such as Jan Dussek who settled in Paris in 1806. These composers were to provide the type of facile virtuosity, bravura effects and cantabile style which is to be found in the apprentice piano works of Alkan. Indeed on surveying the apprentice works of any early-nineteenth-century piano composer, variation and rondo feature strongly. Nevertheless Alkan's careful calculation of the dynamics, the continuation of the introduction's Rossini-type crescendo and the glissandi in thirds are all brilliant examples of French early piano writing. Despite the obsessively scalic variation, one where the writing is much more compact then earlier compositions by Alkan, there is a wider ranging key scheme in this set of variations and stronger textural contrasts.
