For much of the 20th century , Alkan 's work remained in obscurity , but from the 1960s onwards it was steadily revived . Raymond Lewenthal gave a pioneering extended broadcast on Alkan on WBAI radio in New York in 1963 , and later included Alkan 's music in recitals and recordings . The English pianist Ronald Smith championed Alkan 's music through performances , recordings , a biography and the Alkan Society of which he was president for many years . Works by Alkan have also been recorded by Jack Gibbons , Marc @-@ André Hamelin , Mark Latimer , John Ogdon , and Hüseyin Sermet , among many others . Ronald Stevenson have composed a piano piece Festin d 'Alkan ( referring to Alkan 's Op. 39 , no . 12 ) and the composer Michael Finnissy have also written piano pieces referring to Alkan , e.g. Alkan @-@ Paganini , no . 5 of The History of Photography in Sound . Marc @-@ André Hamelin 's Étude No . IV is a moto perpetuo study combining themes from Alkan 's Symphony , Op. 39 , no . 7 , and Alkan 's own perpetual motion étude , Op. 76 , no . 3 . It is dedicated to Averil Kovacs and François Luguenot , respectively activists in the English and French Alkan Societies . As Hamelin write in his preface to this étude , the idea to combine these came from the composer Alistair Hinton , the finale of whose Piano Sonata No. 5 ( 1994 – 95 ) include a substantial section entitled " Alkanique " .