Charles Valentin Alkan (Paris, 1813 – Paris 1888) was a great French pianist and composer.
Several of his compositions are among the most difficult in the piano repertoire.
Alkan was only nine years old when Luigi Cherubini became enchanted by him, to the point of describing his ability as unique.
He was friends with Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, the latter of whom believed that Alkan possessed the most perfect technique among the virtuosos of his time.
Despite his early success, he spent much of his life in religious study (notable are his complete French translations of the Old and New Testaments) and in composition.
Only in the final years of his life did he reappear in public for a series of concerts, in which he played his own compositions and those of his favorite composers.
Musically, Alkan's ideas were far ahead of his time and remained so for a long time (a similar thing happened with Gottschalk Louis Moreau). Debussy and Ravel studied his music, and various echoes of it can be found in their works.
This Saltarelle is - as the word itself says - a saltarello: a dance that held great importance in medieval courts, gradually assuming an increasingly intense rhythm and an increasingly popular character. In reality, the saltarello is not identified with a single type of dance, but - like other great families of traditional Italian dance including the tarantella and the manfrina - it constitutes a choreographic family characterized by numerous variants, many of which utilize improvisation.
