PROGRAM NOTEs

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN E MINOR, OP. 11

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)

Frédéric Chopin holds the enviable position of being the Romantic composer who is perhaps most closely associated with piano composition. Chopin produced works full of delicate nuance and subtle virtuosity. He gave fewer than ten public performances throughout his career, preferring the intimate atmosphere of the salon over the grandeur of the concert hall. It was possibly his somewhat fragile constitution that led to this preference; the composer was in poor health for most of his life and died at age 39. Though Chopin’s greater legacy lies in the smaller piano forms which gained him the most notoriety, he did pen a handful of larger-scale works for piano as well, including two concertos. He composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1830 at just 20 years of age and premiered the work in Warsaw as part of a farewell concert before leaving his native Poland to settle in Paris, where he spent the remainder of his short life.

Opus 11 is structured in the standard three-movement format (fast-slow-fast) typical to instrumental concertos of the time. In this work Chopin delegates the orchestra to a supporting role for the piano rather than the dramatic, dialoguing one more common to the Romantic era. The orchestra takes center stage just once in this work, at the very top: the first movement begins with a full orchestral introduction which serves to build anticipation and introduce the main theme. At length it subsides in preparation for the piano, which enters with a series of dazzling flourishes before presenting the first theme in E minor and the second in E major, both of which are lyrical in character (another departure from the norm of contrasting themes). The remainder of the movement plays on these two ideas; there are no fireworks here, but rather a succession of the composer’s signature rich and decorative passages.

Of the concerto’s second movement, Chopin wrote in a letter to a friend, “The Adagio of my new concerto…is not meant to create a powerful effect: it is rather a Romance, calm and melancholy, giving the impression of someone looking gently toward a spot which calls to mind a thousand happy memories. It is a kind of reverie in the moonlight on a beautiful spring evening.” The movement is earnest in its beauty and reminiscent of the composer’s nocturnes: graceful, song-like, and divinely expressive.

The Rondo finale is based on a Polish folk dance in syncopated duple meter called the Krakowiak. The movement is suffused with a lively, rhythmic energy as the soloist employs the entirety of the keyboard’s range in lightning-quick figurations and concludes in a head-spinning virtuosic rush. It is no wonder that upon the concerto’s premiere a notable music critic declared, “There is spirit in these melodies, there is fantasy in these passages, and everywhere there is originality.”

Note by Laney Boyd