![]() ![]() Mozart’s 27 piano concertos comprise the largest body of piano concertos that are regularly heard in concert halls, although (scandalously) a relatively small handful are regularly performed. 2 in B flat major.Ĭlick to load video 3: Mozart: Piano Concerto In C Minor, K491 Also, hear Brahms’s vast, great-hearted, and utterly different Piano Concerto No. The D minor concerto’s slow movement has been shown to evoke the words “Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini”, suggesting that the work, completed in 1858, is Brahms’s personal Requiem for his mentor. Only months after he and Clara had extended their friendship to the young genius from Hamburg, Schumann suffered a devastating breakdown, attempted suicide, and was thereafter incarcerated in a mental asylum for the rest of his days, dying there in 1856. It was profoundly affected by the fate of Robert Schumann. This concerto took two different forms – symphony, then two-piano sonata – before settling down as a concerto. Finally, the premiere took place in 1924 in Paris, with the composer as its soloist. As if that was not bad enough, the manuscript was then destroyed in a fire following the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Prokofiev had to reconstruct it. Prokofiev had already started work on the piece, but its trajectory was transformed. This rugged, rocky, devastating piece is the work of a young and precocious composer and pianist (he was about 22) faced with a terrible tragedy: one of his closest friends, Maximilian Schmidthof, took his own life in 1913. 2, one of the greatest piano concertos, is the most personal and, in emotional terms, has the most to say. 2Īlthough some of Prokofiev’s other piano concertos are more often performed, the Piano Concerto No. Next comes a debonair scherzo and an irrepressible tarantella finale.Ĭlick to load video 5: Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. This leads into a stormy opening movement, for which Saint-Saëns filched a theme by his star pupil, the young Gabriel Fauré, who had set aside the choral work for which he had written it and did not seem to mind when his teacher turned it into a smash hit. His Piano Concerto No.2, one of the greatest piano concertos, was written (like Grieg’s) in 1868 and was once described as a progression “from Bach to Offenbach.” It opens, sure enough, with a solo piano cadenza that is not many miles away from the style of a baroque organ improvisation. ![]() Nobody twinkles in quite the same way as Camille Saint-Saëns. ![]() There is a healthy number of them, all breathtakingly beautiful among them, the D minor concerto edges ahead for its brilliant, toccata-like writing, its ebullient rhythms, and its poised, meditative slow movement. But that doesn’t mean they can’t also sound a million dollars on the modern piano, and in the 21st century, there is scant reason to confine them to quarters. This may be a controversial choice since Bach’s concertos are really for harpsichord. Love it or loathe it, Turangalîla remains a one-off experience.Ĭlick to load video 13: Bach: Keyboard Concerto In D Minor Yvonne’s sister Jeanne Loriod was this instrument’s chief exponent. ![]() Turangalîla combines eclectic influences, including Indian spirituality, Indonesian gamelan, and a synaesthetic fusion of color with sound and the composer tops the lot with an ondes martenot, the electronic swoops of which made it a favorite in the scores of horror movies. It was premiered in Boston in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and was written for the French pianist Yvonne Loriod, whom Messiaen later married. It’s not called a concerto, but Olivier Messiaen’s gargantuan ten-movement symphony to love, sex, God, and the universe features a solo piano part that could defeat any concerto on home turf. And I have broken the rule in any case… Scroll down to explore our selection of the greatest piano concertos. My one rule is to include only one concerto by each composer, but this does, naturally, give you the chance to explore the competition from their other works too. I’ve therefore picked 15, but some ace favorites are still missing, and I am horrified to find that the list is all-male. Supposing you’re at a shoe shop and you have free rein to select the slinkiest, most stratospherically-heeled jobs on the rack, but what you actually need is a good pair of hiking trainers… Oh, and can you bring yourself to leave the purple suede slingbacks behind? This is rather like trying to choose the top ten best piano concertos from a repertoire so rich that it could keep us happy listening to nothing else for the rest of the year. ![]()
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