Wilhelm Stenhammar - Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 1 (1893)

Carl Wilhelm Eugen Stenhammar (February 7, 1871 – November 20, 1927) was a Swedish composer, conductor and pianist. Please support my channel: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 1 (1893) 1. Molto moderato e maestoso – Sostenuto e tranquillo – Agitato 2. Vivacissimo 3. Andante 4. Allegro commodo - Andante con moto Mats Widlund, piano and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Notes from American Symphony Orchestra: The Concerto leaves no doubt about Stenhammar’s ambition: it is as long as the Brahms Second Piano Concerto (then just thirteen years old) and in the same four-movement form. And while he didn’t get his piano writing from the school of razzle-dazzle, Stenhammar does require a heroic span of nearly continuous playing from his pianist. He sets the tone of the first movement (and much of its thematic agenda) in the opening two chords from the orchestra – a minor chord falling gloomily by the interval of a fourth to another minor chord – very much like the pair of chords that opens Brahms’ Tragic Overture. The piano answers with a cadenza of double octaves, and the Concerto is underway with a dialogue between these two elements -orchestra and piano – instead of the traditional orchestral ritornello. After this introduction, the piano plays the main theme, a quiet, songful melody that begins with the same pair of chords that opened the movement. The exposition of the movement has two other themes: an urgent theme, first played by the piano, starting with a rising scale, and a tranquil, hymn-like theme, that in its first hearing is one of the longest stretches for solo piano in the whole Concerto. The development of these themes and the thunderous recapitulation of the main theme, hold fewer surprises than the serene apotheosis of the rising-scale theme (coming out of order, after the hymn theme), followed by the return of the introduction–a return that prevents what promised to be a major-mode resolution and restores the bleak mood of the opening. Having established his credentials as a suffering Byronic artist in this movement, Stenhammar indulges in more of the pleasures of instrumental color, rhythm, and thematic play in the later movements. The second movement, for instance, is like a scherzo of Schumann in its playful conception, but with the more glittering sonorities of the 1890s–especially right at the end, when the action is done and the glitter keeps on glittering. The slow movement (Andante) combines song with evocations of nature. It is full of songful themes, of which the first, begun with a horn solo, becomes the longest orchestral passage in the concerto. At its later appearances this theme continues to belong to the orchestra, though the piano wraps it in flowing accompaniments. The piano enters with improvisatory musings, in the course of which the orchestra slips back in with its opening melody. At the end, piano and orchestra trade roles, the orchestra taking over the piano’s twittering, while the piano faintly echoes the opening song. The final movement (Allegro commodo) has the boldest theme of the Concerto, starting with what sounds like a chromatic distortion of the falling-fourth figure at the opening of the concerto and continuing with a series of further chromatic dissonances. As the theme goes, so goes the movement, full of chromaticism of a playful sort. But when the conclusion seems to be near, the composer, in a move he could have learned from the Grieg Piano Concerto, turns off this music, and we hear something altogether different, sounding as if in our memory. This soft, sustained theme, played by the piano in spacious chords, is made from the same motive as Stenhammar’s song “Lutad mot gärdet,” according to the Swedish scholar, Bo Waliner. The memory seems to be banished when the main theme returns in its craziest version yet, but in fact the ending is more like a battle of conscience, which the remembered theme quietly wins.