Composed 1830; 40 minutes

Two decades after Beethoven’s Emperor concerto blazed a trail for the piano as hero on the mighty symphonic battlefield, Chopin wrote his E minor concerto. But the 20-year-old Chopin was not temperamentally drawn to battle. His two piano concertos are vehicles for the piano as poet. And it was the music of Mozart that he turned to rather than Beethoven – as did other first generation romantic pianists like Hummel, who provided Chopin with a model for his E minor concerto, and Weber, Moscheles, Ries and Field, whose piano music he also played. The young Chopin followed their example, constructing music of genius out of the building blocks of the emerging romantic style. His concerto is the work of a young composer moving into full expressive control of a musical style. He has little interest in the interplay of piano and orchestra. The orchestral instruments are there primarily to provide a platform for the soloist and to throw into relief the originality and beauty of his piano writing. Indeed, Chopin himself played the concerto with string quartet and even as a piano solo when he moved to Paris. In the three-movement concerto, Chopin shows how he can master the art of decorative melody, drawn from the opera house, where the decoration is itself absorbed into the essence of the melody and harmony. His ornamentation becomes the musical idea itself, enhanced by an altogether original use of the pedals and illuminating harmonies. 

— Program notes and timeline copyright © 2024 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca