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Chopin - Piano Concertos - Emanuel Ax, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy

Posted in Chopin, Concerto, Emanuel Ax, Eugene Ormandy, Piano, RCA, The Philadelphia Orchestra

When Chopin gave the premiere of his F minor piano concerto—the one known as no. 2, although it was written before the E minor concerto—in the first public concert of his own music in Warsaw, on March 17, 1830, he was immediately acclaimed as a national hero. His first appearance in Paris, on February 26, 1832, again performing this concerto, drew the city's most discriminating musicians—both Liszt and Mendelssohn attended and were full of praise. (...)

Of all the developments in music after Beethoven, none is more unlikely than Chopin's success. Within a decade of Beethoven's death, Chopin made a major international career writing mostly small-scale piano pieces. (Every one of his compositions includes the piano. He is unique among major composers; even Liszt, the other outstanding pianist-composer of the nineteenth century, eventually wrote significant orchestral and choral music.) Chopin never thought of composing a symphony, and only in his two piano concertos did he attempt to write for orchestra in the conventional large forms. And yet his impact on the composers of the day and his influence on the music of the future is incalculable. (...)

Chopin's two piano concertos were composed, unapologetically, as showcases for a traveling virtuoso. Both are youthful works, characterized by piano writing of such imagination and beauty that Chopin's inexperience writing for the orchestra is immaterial. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to explain how these two works, written when he was just nineteen and twenty (first the one in F minor, then the E minor score that is played this evening) reveal such emotional depth and range.

Chopin didn't set out to make something new of standard concerto form; both inexperience and a lifelong disinterest in symphonic thought stood in his way. His models were the recent concertos by Johann Nepomuk Hummel—popular, effective, utterly workmanlike scores that were, themselves, updated knock-offs of Mozart's concertos. For a great innovator, Chopin was a man of surprisingly conservative tastes. The only composers he admired without reservation were Mozart and Bach (before a concert he often would play through The Well-Tempered Clavier). He disliked most contemporary music: he had no use for Berlioz or Liszt, and he once said that Schumann's Carnaval, which includes an affectionate parody of Chopin's style, was not music at all. Although the great painter Delacroix was arguably his best friend, Chopin nonetheless preferred the more traditional work of David and Ingres. ...

Phillip Huscher,
the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

[full text here]

Chopin

Piano Concerto nr. 1, in E minor, Op. 11
Piano Concerto nr. 2, in F minor, Op. 21

Emanuel Ax, piano

The Philadelphia Orchestra,
Eugene Ormandy

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