Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

[1830]

Chopin, at the age of 20, was at a crossroads. A child prodigy on the piano, he had been a published composer since the age of seven; while still in high school in Warsaw, he wrote music that soon led his peer Schumann to declare him “a genius.” It was clear that Chopin’s talents were bound to take him beyond his native Poland, so he embarked on the most obvious path and started composing showpieces to play with orchestras.

The problem was that Chopin, a finely-nuanced pianist and an extraordinarily sensitive person, didn’t possess the razzle-dazzle expected on the touring circuit in that era. He wrote two piano concertos that he performed himself at splashy concerts in Warsaw, composed and premiered in the opposite order from how they were published. When he left for what was meant to be his first European tour, he ended up lingering in Vienna and eventually settled in Paris. Finding his niche in the salons of the upper crust, Chopin forged a whole new kind of career as a pianist, where he rarely performed for the general public. After the twin concertos of 1830, he only followed up with one Polonaise for piano and orchestra completed the next year, and then for the rest of his life he managed to avoid doing anything that extroverted again.

The Concerto opens with the bold entrance of the piano at a fortissimo dynamic, and the piano hardly releases the spotlight throughout. The orchestra’s linking passages and subtle accompaniments never overshadow the unquestioned star of the show—even the pianist’s silences constitute noteworthy events.

The delicate Romance is closest in spirit to the intimate forms that proved so fruitful for Chopin in later years. The muted strings impart a comforting warmth, while an excursion into the foreign key of G-sharp major, ending with a clock-like cadenza, adds a dash of fantasy.

The Rondo finale struts to the cadence of a krakowiak, a Polish folk dance from the Krakow region in the south of Poland. This bit of local flavor surely helped win over the concerto’s first audience in Warsaw, and it still makes for a lively sendoff for one of the most exuberant concertos in the piano repertoire.

Solo piano; two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, strings