Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major, S. 125

Program notes

About the Work

Liszt’s two piano concertos were both a long time in the making, and the second took longest of all. He drafted it in 1839, in the middle of the touring years that made him the most famous pianist in Europe, and then put the manuscript away for about a decade. When he took it up again he was living in Weimar as court music director and had turned his main attention from playing to composing. He revised the concerto several times over, and the last round of changes was not finished until 1861.

The first performance took place in Weimar on 7 January 1857. Tonight’s concert falls 170 years later to the day. Liszt did not play the solo part himself: he conducted, and gave the piano to his pupil Hans von Bronsart, to whom the concerto is dedicated. That choice says something about the piece. In manuscript Liszt called it a ‘Concerto symphonique’, a title that points to a work halfway between concerto and symphony, and the piano writing, difficult as it is, is less of a display than in the First Concerto. For long stretches the soloist accompanies the woodwinds and strings instead of dominating them.

The concerto is in a single unbroken movement made of several linked sections, slow and fast, and how many sections there are depends on who is counting. What holds it together is the technique Liszt made his own in the Weimar years, the transformation of themes. A melody heard at the outset comes back again and again with its rhythm, speed, harmony and character changed, so that a gentle idea can return as a march and a stormy one as a song. Liszt used the same method in his symphonic poems and in the Piano Sonata in B minor. A critic at the first performance is said to have summed up the concerto as ‘the life and adventures of a single melody’, and the description still serves well. The Concertgebouw Orchestra’s own introduction makes a similar point: the themes behave like characters in a story, falling into different situations, clashing and forming alliances.

What to Listen For

There is no grand entrance. The concerto opens quietly in the woodwinds, with a slow, dreaming phrase led by the clarinet that drifts between two unrelated chords. Keep hold of this melody, because nearly everything grows from it. The piano comes in almost shyly, decorating it with arpeggios.

The calm is broken by a fast, agitated section that does the job of a scherzo, full of hammered octaves and driving rhythm. When it burns out, listen for one of the loveliest pages in the work: a solo cello sings the opening theme while the piano accompanies, in a style that owes a good deal to Italian opera.

The energy builds again, and the opening melody returns in its most surprising form, as a full-blooded march for the whole orchestra. Some critics have found this transformation vulgar. Others hear it as the masterstroke of the piece, the moment that brings the music firmly back to its home key of A major after a long journey away from it. From there the concerto presses on to a fast and brilliant close, with the pianist finally given room for glittering runs up and down the keyboard.