Beethoven premiered it in in his first public concert in Vienna, having written the finale only two days earlier. His friend Franz Wegeler recalled him racing against the clock to finish it, handing over the sheets of manuscript page by fresh page to four copyists waiting outside.
Nevertheless, he then revised it extensively; it was not finalised for another five years. Unquenchable energy, wit and good humour bounce out of this music. Its outer two movements are unmistakable for their vivacity; the first, moreover, presents the soloist with a choice of three cadenzas by the composer, the initial one modest in scale, the second more substantial and the third — written much later — so long and demanding that some pianists avoid it for fear of overbalancing the whole piece.
Beethoven uses the same concerto structure as Mozart: an opening allegro in processional mode, a lyrical slow movement and a dancelike conclusion. Yet he pushes everything several steps further. This was written as the 19th century was taking wing; its first performance, given by the composer himself, was on 5 April Only six months earlier, Beethoven had experienced the terrible crisis in which he faced up in earnest to his hearing loss.
It is brave, for a start, to begin a concerto with the soloist playing alone, very quietly. Yet Beethoven was not entirely successful in this, especially with the C major. The solo part was very difficult. The first movement was splendidly worked out, but the modulations were far too excessive; the Adagio in A flat major was an extremely pleasant piece, richly melodic, and was greatly embellished by the obbligato clarinet.
For whatever Beethoven may have felt about his living contemporaries, a chief stumbling block to his peace of mind was the shadow of Mozart whose absent presence, in the ten years following his death in , was a significant part of Viennese musical life.
It was only with his third concerto, the C minor op. In addition to such a total sum of beautiful and noble ideas, the reviewer finds, at the very least, in none of his newest works such a thorough working out yet without becoming turgid or overly learned, a character so solidly maintained without excess, and such unity in workmanship. It will and must have the greatest and most beautiful effect everywhere that it can be well performed.
Piano Concerto No. Beethoven lets the pianist finish the first movement with full-handed chords together with the orchestra in fortissimo. Letting the soloist and the orchestra powerfully build up the final culmination together after the cadenza was a new idea that was taken up by many composers, including Schumann, Ravel and Rachmaninoff.
And it is these themes, e. The cheerful mood of the end was also used as a model by subsequent generations because Beethoven presents the theme in the major key so that the prolonged struggle is followed by a welldeserved upbeat end. String players and soloist are treated as equals, their parts interwoven with one another. The following slow movement, however, is truly unique in so far as neither before nor afterwards was a slow movement composed like that: themes of melodious character alternate with shrieking trills, and sighs can be heard in the seventh chords.
Within one single movement Beethoven really pulls out all the stops where emotions are concerned and breaks with the then usual character illustrations and normal conventions. The final movement follows attacca in pianissimo , which provides a seamless transition. Beethoven composed the last of his five piano concertos—Piano Concerto in E sharp major Op. It was premiered with Friedrich Schneider as soloist at the 7th Gewandhaus concert in Leipzig.
At the Barbican in London, the climax of the year-long celebration was planned to be a complete cycle of the five piano concertos, with Krystian Zimerman and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle.
They recorded the third, fourth and fifth concertos together, but before the series could be completed Bernstein died, and Zimerman himself directed the VPO from the keyboard in the first and second concertos. Other pianists may extract more profundity from the slow movements of the third and fourth concertos, perhaps, or invest the opening of the fifth, the Emperor, with more self-conscious grandeur, but few convey the sense of wholeness in each work more satisfyingly than Zimerman does.
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