Anne Midgette of the Washington Post reviews “The Enigma of Paris: Charles-Valentin Alkan, Frédéric Chopin and the French-Jewish Romance:”
Hamelin also did an outstanding job bringing across a lot of unfamiliar music to the audience. Alkan was once a star performer and later a recluse, long associated with the spurious but dramatic story that he died pulling the Talmud from a bookshelf that collapsed on him (Charles Krauthammer, the columnist who founded Pro Musica Hebraica with his wife, Robyn, said in his introduction from the stage that this accorded perfectly with his own impression of the Talmud, “beautiful but deadly”). His work is technically difficult and quintessentially romantic, making it an ideal vehicle for Hamelin, who certainly made a case for getting to know it better.