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Probably these subject was posted before, but I haven't seen it.

What do you think?

I think that I will choose TCHAIKOVSKY's 2nd concerto, and MOSZKOWSKY's Concerto.. and sooo many others along their side.

I agree that the Tchaikovsky 2 is definitely underplayed. I'm not as big on the Moskowsky, but it doesn't quite deserve the oblivion it's fallen into.

The Massenet concerto is another one that I think should be played more often.

Dohnanyi #2 is a favourite of mine. Apropos of the Howard Shelley thread, he has made an excellent recording of it.

Also, after hearing Hamelin play them - Scharwenka #1 & Rubinstein #4.

All the Bach keyboard concertos are wonderful, but it seems only the D minor and F minor have become "popular".

scriabin concerto

Dvorak

I think this proves your point but I've never heard of any of these concertos, and don't even know who half of the composers are. I'm just starting out with this whole classical thing so I haven't heard much yet. Err..this post was off topic, sorry. :¬)

The Weber Konzertstück. While not a Concerto by title, it has three wonderful movements.

The 3 Medtner concertos.

Hamelin's Ruby 4th is ridiculously fast, it degrades the concerto to a hollow showpiece. If you really wanna here it played seek out the Hofmann recordings, which are infinitely better.

I'd add Henselt, Bortkiewicz, Rubinstein 3rd, Paderweski.

The Saint-Saens Concertos are really beautiful. The fourth is particularly moving -- from the opening theme (and subsequent variations), leading up to the very boldly stated final melody, which builds up to a dramatic brass-filled finale. Along the way, enjoy lovely romantic meanderings and orchestrations. I really do LOVE this piece and it should be played alot more. It would be a great alternative to the overplayed war-horses, as it is NOT technically easy, and so challenging for an accomplished student.

Poulenc, Prokofiev 4, Schoenberg

Saint-Saens 5. While it may not be the most underplayed concerto when compared to Scriabin or Dvorak's., I think it is the best he composed and should be played more.

The Shostakovich ones aren't played too often, and while they're not obscure, I think they're absolutely first-rate concertos- masterpieces. I think the second one gets played a little more as it's an appropriate student concerto.

Couldn't agree more.

there is the tveitt first piano concerto, bliss, sheila silver

Oh my god the Grieg is so underplayed. If only I could see a performance...


Seriously, the Barber concerto and Ginastera concertos.

It's mostly marketing.

Why learn Barber when no symphony will hire you to play it?

i like Saint-Saens 4th as well, which has some haunting effect on me. i saw live performance of Dvorak's concerto once, but wasn't so impressed with the music though.

Really? The Dvorak is also one of my favorites.

Our Las Vegas orchestra performed it a few years back with David Korevaar (sp?) and I was horribly frustrated when I wasn't able to make it.

The MacDowell No. 2 - it has everything! I first heard this piece 35 years ago and it is stil one of my favorites. Dramatic, lyrical, playful. Technically challenging. Another one to consider.

Yeah, I like it a lot. Dvorak was a wonderful orchestrator. The piano part's good, too.

Richter/Kleiber made a wonderful recording of this concerto.

Even though I like the piece in some ways, the Dvorak concerto suffers from awful structural problems. It's just a string of pretty sections with intermittent flash and "climaxes" that just come out of nowhere.

The Rubinstein 4th concerto is simply no good. It lacks a single interesting melody, it's formally predictable, and it isn't even very original piano writing (nothing here that Liszt hadn't already done). The only reason this piece still gets mentionned is because Hoffmann liked it (and of course he would be partial to a gift to him from his famous teacher).

Saint-Saens 4 just gets SO irritating with that one little motive repeated 1000 times in the first movement. Who wants to learn all those notes for so little musical reward?

Weber Konzertstucke--yuck!

In general, the ten or so 19th-century concerti that we hear over and over again really are the creme of that particular crop; I think time has chosen its favorites wisely. That Hyperion series "The Romantic Piano Concertos," which seems to have more than a few listeners on this thread, has tried to do a great thing by reviving interest in forgotten repertoire, and was probably inspired by the current trend toward neo-romanticism, but it's definitely fooled a lot of people into thinking that those pieces are genuinely interesting, independently of historical interest.

PianoJohn does have a point, and time somehow has filtered out those good and well known ones from those less known or forgotten.

Still, it's refreshing to hear something other than the usual piano concerti, even if they're perhaps a cut below the greats. Listening to the exact same concerti (great as they are) over and over again gets boring - I enjoy hearing something different now and then.

In one of Rachmaninoff's letters:
"Went to a concert last night and heard a terrible concerto by some American composer named Dowell..."

Well, I like it. In my earlier days I collected scores of unknown concertos:
*Albeniz
*Brull 2 (delightful)
*d'Albert
*Czerny a minor (gotta identify the key since he wrote 1 concerto about 200 times!)
*Dohnanyi 1 & 2
*Hummel a min. & b-min.
*Kuhlau
*Moszkowski
*Raff
*Reinecke 1
*Scharwenka 2
*Sgambatti
*Weber 1 & 2

Whole slew of others I can't recall at the moment.
All of them gathering dust in my closet.

Hmmm... A closet concerto collector. Well, we won't tell anyone if you don't want us to.

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush...

In September of 2005 I posed a question to this forumon concerning Piano Concertos. I received some helpful answers to my questions which prompted me to purchase many piano concertos written by composers with whom I was unfamiliar. The "Hyperion" series was a revelation which led me to the music of Xaver Scharwenka. His Piano Concerto #3 in C# minor, op 80, has become my favorite Piano Concerto (Especially the 1st and 3rd movement). I love this music and I am trying to find the score transcribed for two pianos. So far with no results. (Any help appreciated!)
If you are unfamiliar with this composition, I urge you to give it a listen. I love it! I hope you do too!

Best Wishes,
Jim Bottom

Yeah, plus the second one is one of the few (only, possibly!) 'happy' pieces that he wrote - and even then it's debatable!

I wasn't impressed either. I agree with PianoJohn. Though I heard it's treacherously difficult.

Czerny's Concerto in C Major for Piano 4 Hands, Op.153.

This is music so delightful it is guaranteed to make you smile.

Richard Andinsell (spelling?)- Warsaw Concerto...

Beautiful music... quite similar to Rachmaninov I think.

*laughs* It's not marketing so much as popularity. Due to music being an art form, it is subject to popularity contests. What is most popular gets played more often. The question you've got to start asking is, "Why are the more-played concertos more popular than the less-played concertos?" And the obvious follow-up, "Is it because they are better?"

To the last question, I would answer no. They are more memorable, but 'better' requires some concrete to compare to, and art is certainly not meant to be concrete or perfect.

Joey: Is your Moszkowsi concerto transcribed for second piano, but any chance? If it is, whats the publisher? I'm going to try to get my music store to dig it up from somewhere--they're pretty good at that. Its somehow become one of my favorite concertos.

MacDowell 2nd (the "terrible" concerto Rachmaninoff complained about must have been the 1st) -- Wild and Cliburn both do it well; and

Hummel's two concertos -- Hough's recording is magnificent.

I don't know how frequently played the Bartok concertos are (I'd be glad to be enlightened on that), but while we're on the topic of concertos, I'll just chime in that Bartok 3 has a really nice 2nd movement. (I didn't want to dig up the old concerto second movements thread.)

Also Hummel's concerti are quite nice. Among the 20th century ones, Pancho Vladigerov has 5 of them, the first and the 3rd are quite good.

Anybody listened to Selim Palmgren's piano concertos? I listened to some of them years ago (only once), and can't recall much anything about them...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000026CP8/

The Moszkowski Concerto is published by Peters in a 2-piano score and is available from SheetMusicPlus.

Thanks BDB. Really appreciate that. Actually, I found a recording of the Moszkowski Concerto on Piano Society. It's good AND free!

I'm very partial to Tchaikowsky 2nd and Barber.

I love playing the 2nd movement of the Barber with another pianist (but the other pianist always complains too much)! :p

I have a CD of Stephen Hough playing Hummel's piano concerto in A minor, op. 85, and the one in B minor op. 89. Both are wonderful, and Hough is certainly up the to pianistic skill needed to do justice to their difficulties.
They are very interesting compositions, yet I rarely if ever hear them played, or even mentioned. Hummel also wrote some marvelous piano sonatas, but they are rarely played, and I don't see where anyone has included them in their repertoire. Is there a bias against the music of Hummel? Gaby Tu

Franck.

I'm such a big fan of his music. I only wish that he had've written more for piano.

TS, I'm with you on that!

Actually Franck produced a lot for the piano, in comparison to his 12 major organ works. Those pieces are among the best things ever written for organ (besides Bach of course), but there are ONLY twelve pieces!

Franck's Symphonic Variations are gorgeous, did he write other works for piano & orchestra?

The Scharwenka Concerto No. 4 is one of my favorite concertos and is nowhere as popular as it should be.

Hyperion has a great series - "Romantic Piano Concertos" - which is up to about volume 35. Many of the concertos mentioned here are part of the series. I like the d'Indy "Symphony on a French Mountain Air" which I haven't heard in years. A nice piece.

I kinda like the Konzertstucke. It's not a "great" piece of music, I'll admit it, but the last part has a lot of zip. (Reminds me alot of the last movement of the Mendelssohn G minor.)

Absolutely. A criminally underplayed concerto, the Symphonic Variations, is a masterpiece!

Actually Tchaikovsky wrote 3 pianoconcertos and a fantasie de concert op. 56 (score looks terrible ), so why is only the 1st performed often, the 2nd mentioned just occasionally, and the 3rd and the fantasie completely unknown?

I actually heard a performance of Tchaikovsky's second last night from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (not sure who the soloist was) - what an incredible piece. As much as I enjoy the first, I think almost prefer the second. I also enjoy his Concert Fantasy quite a bit, but it admittedly has some oddities to it, notably the form. Such as what is that incredibly long solo section in the middle of the first movement, what's up with that?

I could never get into his third PC, which he only partially completed. I wonder if I'd like it better if he finished it as opposed to Taneyev (if I'm not mistaken).

The 2nd concerto is so interesting! I actually learned the first movement, but could never get it together to find another pianist (or orchestra)! The theme of the 1st movement is quite impressive.

I heard the 3rd on the radio once, and found it intriguing but inconsistent - probably because it was incomplete.

i'd love to hear of a great russian composer of today who has adpet influence, knowledge and feeling of the essence tchaikovsky's music. such a person may be able to complete the whole concerto himself:p...he can introduce a second and a third movement. what do you guys think?

more than just one composer...i'd love to even hear variations

then have Nikolai Lugansky perform the piano part with the Russian National Orchestra...or me :p for the world to hear and behold