Curiosity Piece

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."

Child Actor. Like Alkan, Lewenthal has known his share of the frustrations of the creative life. Raised in Hollywood by his divorced mother (who was born in Paris just a block away from Alkan's home), he appeared as a bit actor in several Jackie Cooper films, attended a professional school "for spoiled movie brats." At 20, with prize money he won in piano competitions, he went to Manhattan to study with Olga Samaroff Stokowski, Leopold's first wife and a former pupil of Elie's, the fellow with the apes and the cockatoos. After his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1946, Lewenthal toured the U.S. for three years. While he was walking through Central Park one summer evening in 1953, a gang of thugs attacked him with clubs and fractured seven bones in his arms and hands. He recovered without impairment of his playing, but the experience so embittered him that he gave up concertizing for three years and supported himself by playing the piano accompaniment for a girls' gym class at Hunter College. "When you're beaten up by your fellow man," he explains, reasonably enough, "you don't feel like performing for him in public."

In 1956, however, Lewenthal went to Europe to resume his career. For three years, he lived out of a suitcase and slept on park benches. Promised a teaching job in Rio de Janeiro, he wrangled free passage on a steamer only to find upon his arrival that the job was nonexistent. Destitute, he went from door to door offering piano lessons, finally saved enough money to return to the U.S. in 1961. Deciding "to get myself out of the clutches of life for a while," he immersed himself in the "Alkanian labyrinths."

Decisive End. "If Alkan had to perform his works in public, I'm sure he would have been kinder to himself," says Lewenthal, whose impulsive, steel-wristed style of playing is just right for Alkan. For him the concert stage is an arena, his mission "to slay the black dragon with the 88 gleaming teeth." To create the "proper atmosphere," he has the lights dimmed until he is little more than a silhouette on stage. A tall, hulking figure with a luxuriant growth of swept-winged black hair, he almost leaps off the bench to hammer home a fistful of crashing chords. In more reflective moods, he coaxes the music along with the suspenseful air of a man defusing a time bomb, then counterattacks with a dazzling flurry of runs and leaping crescendoes. The black dragon never has a chance.

Obviously, it is more than Alkan's music that drives Lewenthal toward the dragon; there is a sense of kinship with Alkan himself. "The life of Alkan," he says, "was full of galling disappointments and frustrations, of which its end was its most decisive event."

Alkan died at the age of 74, when, as he reached for a volume of his beloved Talmud, the massive bookcase tipped over and crushed him to death.

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