Mendelssohn is one of my favorite composers – several of his works are on my Top 100 list, HERE – and now that I’ve listened to his Piano Concerto No. 1, I’m pretty sure I have heard it before. Something about the third movement sounded very familiar.
However, this concerto has not been one of my “go to” pieces when I’m in the mood to hear a piano concerto (like the Rachmaninoff 2, the Grieg, Beethoven’s “Emperor,” Mozart's No. 21, the Rach 3, etc.). Still, the first and second movements did not sound familiar at all, so maybe I haven’t heard it in the past? The concerto consists of three movements:
Contrary to the standard practice of the day, the featured instrument (i.e., the piano) enters very quickly after only a few bars of orchestral introduction. From a Wikipedia article about the concerto: “It was standard procedure in the classical-era concerto to precede the solo's entrance by a tutti, for various reasons – the length and purpose of these introductions differed, some offering a hint of what was to follow and some giving out almost all the movement's material, but none was so brief as this: in this sense, this was one of the first concertos of the Romantic age. (The obvious exceptions – Mozart's Jeunehomme concerto and Beethoven's fourth and fifth piano concertos – allowed the piano to enter very briefly just at the start, but then proceeded as usual, the soloist silent.)” The complete article is HERE. When the piano enters, it does so with force and passion, almost anger. The movement is filled with so much furor that I wondered what in the world was going on in Mendelssohn’s life when he wrote it. I ran a Google search on the piece to find out when it was written, and in the article I linked above, I found this: “Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, was written in 1830–31, around the same time as his fourth symphony ("Italian")....” Well, that certainly shattered my theory that something serious might have been going on with Mendelssohn because his fourth symphony is one of the most joyous pieces ever written. In addition, according to the same article, Mendelssohn said of the concerto "I wrote it in but a few days and almost carelessly.” Hmm…if only I were so careless. LOL. The second movement, written in a major key, shifts the tone of the concerto, and the third and final movement, which opens with a fanfare in A minor, modulates to E major and closes the work with an upbeat and lighter mood. And now, due to my practice of listening to a new piece each week, my list of "go to" piano concertos is growing!
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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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