FREDERIC CHOPIN: Allegro de concert op.46 (piano and orchestra version by J.NICODE)
POLISH CHAMBER PHILHARMONIC, WOJCIECH RAJSKI
SETRAK SETRAKIAN,PIANO
ORCHESTRATION BY JEAN-LOUIS NICODE (1853-1919)
Photos:POLAND
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frédéric Chopin's Allegro de concert, Op. 46, is a piece for piano, published in November 1841. It is in one movement and takes between 11 and 15 minutes to play. The principal themes are bold and expressive. It has a curious place in the Chopin canon, and while its history is obscure, the evidence supports the view, shared by Robert Schumann and others, that it started out as the first movement of a projected third piano concerto, of which the orchestral parts are either now non-existent or were never scored at all. There is no evidence that Chopin ever even started work on the latter movements of this concerto.
History
Chopin published his two piano concertos in 1830. That same year he wrote that he was planning a concerto for two pianos and orchestra, and would play it with his friend Tomasz Napoleon Nidecki if he managed to finish it. He worked on it for some months but he had the greatest difficulty with it, and this work never eventuated; however, he may have used ideas from it in later works.
There is also evidence that Chopin started work on a third concerto for piano and orchestra. In Chopin: The Piano Concertos, Rink quotes from an unpublished Chopin letter, dated 10 September 1841, offering Breitkopf & Härtel an "Allegro maestoso (du 3me Concerto) pour piano seul" for 1,000 francs. In November 1841, Schlesinger published the Allegro de concert, which has a tempo indication of "Allegro maestoso", and Breitkopf & Härtel also published it in December of the same year. The work has the general characteristics of the opening movement of a concerto from around that time. It contains a lengthy introduction, with the section corresponding to the original piano solo commencing at bar 87. It seems clear that the "Allegro maestoso" Chopin referred to in his letter was the piece published two months later as Allegro de concert, Op. 46.
Reception
The Allegro de concert includes certain devices which reflect a more virtuosic technique than that required by his two published concertos.[6] Technical difficulties include dense musical textures, complex and light finger work, massive leaps of left hand chords, trills and scales in double notes and difficult octaves. For this reason it is considered one of Chopin's most difficult pieces, but regardless of this challenge, some pianists and critics find it unconvincing. It has received relatively little attention in the concert hall or in recordings, and it is not particularly well known to music lovers. Those who have recorded it include Claudio Arrau, Nikolai Demidenko, Garrick Ohlsson, Nikita Magaloff, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Roger Woodward. However, Chopin himself seems to have been very proud of it. He told Aleksander Hoffmann: "This is the very first piece I shall play in my first concert upon returning home to a free Warsaw". Chopin never returned to Warsaw, and it is perhaps for this reason that there is no record of him ever playing it in public. In fact, there seems to be no record of its first public performance at all. (Claude Debussy played it at the Paris Conservatoire in July 1879) The work received one of its rare public performances at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the early 1980s as the opening work for a 'quasi orchestral' solo piano recital by British pianist Mark Latimer that ended with only the second London performance of the equally demanding Concerto for Solo Piano by Charles-Valentin Alkan.