For the past few weeks, I’ve been working my way down a list of underrated – and unknown to me – composers from the Romantic era. This week I listened to a piano concerto by Viktor Konsenko.
After I typed “Viktor Konsenko” into the search line of YouTube, various pieces popped up. However, one of them, his piano concerto, had been uploaded with the caption “**MUST HEAR**.” Okay, I thought, if this is a “MUST HEAR,” then I must hear it – and I’m glad I did. Wow, what a piece! Think the Tchaikovsky concerto in B flat minor, the opening of the Grieg A minor concerto, the Warsaw Concerto, or the Brahms No. 1 in D minor. There is nothing more exciting than a pianist pounding out a piano line in an explosion of power and passion with a rousing orchestration behind it – and THAT is the Kosenko concerto in a nutshell. The concerto was composed in 1928, and it’s comprised of three movements:
I will note, though, that I saw some comments like, “I wonder how much of the 2nd and 3rd movements are really Kosenko?” and “lost parts of 2nd,3rd movement (were composed) during World War II (1939-1945), and “later completed in 1937” (Kosenko died of kidney cancer in October 1938) – so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on with that. Still, I enjoyed the full concerto, no matter when written and/or by whom. ; ) In the first movement, the orchestra opens with a crescendo that swells to a passionate pitch, and then the piano enters with a run of keys pounded out in octaves – and the race is on, so to speak. As I listened, I skimmed the comments under the linked video above, and I actually LOL’d when I read this because it captured exactly what I was thinking: “I just love the over the top do everything a piano can do romanticism of the 1st movement.” There were other comments under the video that also connected with me: “This supercharged potboiler surely provided many a concertgoer with an exhilarating and uplifting experience.” “The piano writing is simply stunning, such a shame it has fallen into neglect. I would demand a revival, but fear from opposition that Rachmaninov is superior. It probably is, but what the hell!!" “Echoes of Rachmaninoff” (specifically, his Concerto No. 2 in C minor, the same key as this concerto) – and “Heavily influenced, he produced this concerto but sadly failed to match up to Rachmaninov's mastery in orchestration” (which is spot on). At one point early in the week, when I first searched for the concerto on Spotify, I couldn’t find the complete work, so my first experience listening to Kosenko’s piece was with the 2nd movement only – and I loved what I was hearing. Not too long into it, though, I wondered why I was hearing piano only and no orchestra. It turned out I was listening to a piano transcription of the movement, but still, it was riveting. I loved the range and use of the entire keyboard with both the orchestra’s and piano’s parts. That was all I could find on Spotify. I would have loved to have heard the entire piece as transcribed for the piano, but I thoroughly enjoyed the piece with full orchestra on YouTube. @collectionCBR was right when he or she posted the video: Kosenko’s concerto is a “MUST HEAR.”
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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