Mayfield Promotions

ALKAN: “The Berlioz of the piano”

Jack Gibbons’ 35th annual Oxford Summer Piano Series

Wed 26 Jul

Tickets £20 (Any tickets remaining on the night will be sold on the door of the venue £25 per ticket)

Season ticket covering all 8 concerts of the 2023 Summer Piano Series £88 (The season ticket must be purchased in one transaction. You must have a ticket for each concert in your basket. The discount cannot be applied retrospectively)

ALKAN: Symphony for solo piano Op.39 (Douze Etudes Op.39 nos. 4, 5, 6 & 7)
ALKAN: “La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer” (Preludes Op.31 no.8)
ALKAN: Saltarelle Op.23
ALKAN: “En songe” (Esquisses Op.63 no.48)
ALKAN: Concerto for solo piano (Douze Etudes Op.39 nos. 8, 9 & 10)

The acclaimed pianist Jack Gibbons celebrates the 35^th year of his highly popular Oxford Summer Piano Series, founded in 1988, with a series of biographical programmes in the historic Holywell Music Room. Tonight’s special concert celebrates the 210^th anniversary of the birth of French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, contemporary and friend of Chopin and Liszt, whose music makes extraordinary demands on the technique and stamina of the performer. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the first recordings of such masterpieces as the Concerto for solo piano and Symphony for solo piano appeared after a century of neglect. Gibbons gave one the first ever complete performances of Alkan’s monumental Concerto for solo piano here in Oxford in 1978, a work that has been hailed as a musical epic and one of the most original and haunting piano works of its century.