Allegro de Concert (Chopin)
Encyclopedia
Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

’s Allegro de concert, Op. 46, is a piece for piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...

, published in November 1841. It is in one movement and takes between 13 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
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

 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 two movements of this concerto.

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 Napoleon Tomasz Nidecki (1807-1852) 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 solo 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 In Chopin: The Piano Concertos, Rink quotes from an unpublished Chopin letter, dated 10 September 1841, offering Breitkopf & Härtel an "Allegro maestoso (du 3me Concerto) pour piano seul" for 1000 francs.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.

The first few notes of the piece were drafted around 1832, but it is not known when the rest of the piece was written. Chopin dedicated it to Friederike Müller (1816-1895), one of his favourite pupils, who studied with him for 18 months (1839-1841). Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...

 gave her the nickname "Mademoiselle opus quarante- six" ("forty six", the work's opus number, in French).

The Allegro de concert includes certain devices which reflect a more virtuosic technique than that required by his two published concertos. 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
Claudio Arrau
Claudio Arrau León was a Chilean pianist known for his interpretations of a vast repertoire spanning from the baroque to 20th-century composers, especially Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and Debussy...

, Nikolai Demidenko
Nikolai Demidenko
Nikolai Demidenko is a Russian pianist.Demidenko studied at the Moscow Gnessin School with Anna Kantor and at the Moscow Conservatoire under Dmitri Bashkirov. Demidenko was a medallist at the 1976 Montreal International Piano Competition and the 1978 Tchaikovsky International Competition...

, Garrick Ohlsson
Garrick Ohlsson
Garrick Ohlsson is an American classical pianist.Ohlsson was the first American to win first prize in the International Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition, in 1970. He also won first prize at the Busoni Competition in Italy and the Montreal Piano Competition in Canada...

, Nikita Magaloff
Nikita Magaloff
Nikita Magaloff was a Georgian-Russian pianist.He was born in Saint Petersburg to a Georgian noble family named Maghalashvili. Magaloff and his family left Russia in 1918 for Finland and then Paris, where he studied with Isidor Philipp, chair of the piano department at the Paris Conservatory...

, Vladimir Ashkenazy
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy is a Russian-Icelandic conductor and pianist. Since 1972 he has been a citizen of Iceland, his wife Þórunn's country of birth. Since 1978, because of his many obligations in Europe, he and his family have resided in Meggen, near Lucerne in Switzerland...

 and Roger Woodward
Roger Woodward
Roger Woodward AC OBE is an Australian classical concert pianist.-Biography:Roger Woodward was born in 1942 in Chatswood, a suburb of Sydney, the youngest of four children to Gladys and Frank 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
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

 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 that ended with only the second London performance of the equally demanding complete Alkan
Charles-Valentin Alkan
Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and one of the greatest virtuoso pianists of his day. His attachment to his Jewish origins is displayed both in his life and his work. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of six, earning many awards, and as an adult became a famous virtuoso...

 Concerto for Solo Piano by British pianist Mark Latimer
Mark Latimer
Mark Latimer is an English pianist.His repertoire consists of over 75 performed piano concertos, including the mammoth Concerto for Piano and Chorus by Busoni and the Alkan Concerto for solo piano, of which he made the first live recording...

.

Orchestrations

Some attempts have been made to score the Allegro de concert for piano and orchestra as probably originally intended by Chopin. Jean Louis Nicodé
Jean Louis Nicode
Jean Louis Nicodé was a Prussian pianist, composer and conductor.He was born in Jersitz . He was initially taught by his father, an amateur violinist, pianist, conductor and composer...

 produced two versions - one for two pianos, and a later one for piano and orchestra - but he added various parts of his own creation, amounting to 70 bars of new music (a development section after bar 205, a third tutti, etc.). He also "beefs up" the piano part towards the end. This version was first played by the Dutch pianist Marie Geselschap in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, with an orchestra conducted by Anton Seidl
Anton Seidl
Anton Seidl was a Hungarian conductor.-Biography:He was born at Pest, Hungary. He began the study of music at a very early age, and when only seven years old could pick out at the piano melodies which he had heard at the theatre...

.

In the early 1930s, Kazimierz Wiłkomirski made another orchestration that was faithful to Chopin's published score. The world premiere recording of this version was by Michael Ponti
Michael Ponti
Michael Ponti is a concert and recording pianist.-Life and career:Ponti was born in Germany, but has lived in the United States for most of his life...

 with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Völker Schmidt-Gertenbach.

The Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n pianist Alan Kogosowski
Alan Kogosowski
-Biography:Alan Kogosowski was born in Melbourne. From the age of six he played the piano for ten hours a day. He won a number of competitions and prizes, including the Australian television talent quest "BP Showcase 1966"...

 went further. In addition to restructuring and augmenting Chopin's music for the Allegro de concert into a new treatment for piano and orchestra, he also created settings for piano and orchestra of the Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. posth. "Lento con gran espressione", and the Boléro in C major-A minor, Op. 19. Kogosowski put these together as a three-movement work and performed it under the misleading title of "Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 3 in A major" on 8 October 1999, with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Detroit Symphony Orchestra
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Detroit, Michigan. Its main performance center is Orchestra Hall at the Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit's Midtown neighborhood...

 under Neeme Järvi
Neeme Järvi
Neeme Järvi is an Estonian-born conductor.-Early life:Järvi studied music first in Tallinn, and later in Leningrad at the Leningrad Conservatory under Yevgeny Mravinsky, and Nikolai Rabinovich, among others...

.

Sources

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