Chopin wrote his two Concerto Pianos when he was just about twenty. He started writing his concerto piano no.2 in 1829 when he was just nineteen and finished it the following year. Despite the numbering this was his first concerto and Piano Concerto no. 1 was written the next summer.

In 1829, at the age of nineteen, Chopin went to Vienna and attracted a great deal of attention with his overtly Polish works. He began the F-minor concerto on this trip and when he returned to Poland, he concentrated on finishing the piece.

Despite the young composer’s relative inexperience, his concertos are extraordinary in that special way that makes his music personal and immediately identifiable. His concertos are completely different from what we hear from previous masters. Questions and answers between solo instrument and the orchestra started from Mozart and reached a high degree of beauty in Beethoven’s, aren’t found here. The opening movement begins with a series of typical concerto gambits, but when the Piano enters, Chopin’s personality at once takes over.

Here I’ve chosen second and third movements for you to download. Chopin wrote to a friend that his Adagio (second movement) had been inspired by tender feelings for one Constantia Gladkowska, a vocal student at the Warsaw Conservatory, “whom I dream of”. The finale, is related to that Polish country dance, the Mazurka, that Chopin made so wonderfully his own. The traditional mazurka was in triple time accompanied by strong accents on the second or third beat (when danced, the accents are reinforced by a strong tap of the heel). This movement is a rondo with several sharply contrasting themes in mazurka style, closing with a dramatic coda.

This post is a surprise and a generosity from Lord and my friend and co-author of this weblog, Ali as we have uploaded three different performances of the third movement! We could have uploaded the whole piece instead, but don’t you think that would be against copy right law?

So, here you can download second and third movements performed by Sviatoslav Richter as the pianist with USSR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yevgeny Svetlanov, and the third movement by Vladimir Ashkenazy as the pianist. And this last one, third movement again, which I don’t have its details or even solo pianist, unfortunately!

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