Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16

Program notes

About the Work

Grieg wrote his only piano concerto in the summer of 1868, when he was in his mid-twenties. He and his wife Nina were spending the season at Søllerød in Denmark, and the concerto was the product of a few unusually happy and productive months. It was first played in Copenhagen on 3 April 1869 by the pianist Edmund Neupert, with Holger Simon Paulli conducting, and it has been popular ever since.

The model is easy to hear. As a fifteen-year-old student in Leipzig, Grieg had heard Clara Schumann play her husband’s Piano Concerto, and the experience stayed with him. Ten years later he chose the same key, A minor, and began in the same way: Schumann opens with a single stroke from the orchestra and a cascade of chords from the soloist, and Grieg does likewise, adding a drum roll for good measure.

What makes the piece his own is what he had found since Leipzig, the folk music of Norway. The falling figure that the piano hurls down the keyboard in the first bars is a favourite melodic turn of Norwegian folk tunes and of Grieg’s own music. The finale is built on the rhythms of Norwegian dances, the leaping halling and the triple-time springdans, and there are passages that imitate the country fiddle.

In 1870 Grieg took the manuscript to Franz Liszt in Rome. Liszt played it through at sight, orchestral part and all, before a room full of musicians, and was delighted by it. Grieg himself was never quite finished with the piece. He revised it many times over the following decades, usually in small ways, and completed the last version only weeks before his death in 1907.

The soloist in these concerts is Leif Ove Andsnes, a Norwegian pianist in the Norwegian concerto.

What to Listen For

Allegro molto moderato. A drum roll swells from nothing, the orchestra strikes one chord, and the piano crashes down the length of the keyboard. After that flourish the woodwind give out the main theme quietly, a tune with a march rhythm that is meant to be played gently. The second theme belongs to the cellos, warm and songlike. Near the end the soloist has a long cadenza, which is Grieg’s own and builds from a murmur to full thunder before the opening flourish returns.

Adagio. Muted strings play a long, calm melody in a distant key, D-flat major. The piano does not take it up at first but answers with delicate filigree of its own, and only later states the theme in full, grandly. The movement leads into the finale almost without a pause.

Allegro moderato molto e marcato. The main theme is a halling, stamped out by the piano with strong accents. In the middle the dance stops and a solo flute plays a new melody, high and still, over shimmering strings: a clearing in the forest. The dance returns, then changes into a quick triple-time version of itself, and at the very end the flute’s quiet tune comes back transformed, in the full orchestra and the major key, with the piano thundering chords beneath it.