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As a throwback to the multi-leveled activities of pianists of the past, Alan Kogosowski has introduced two major additions to the concert repertoire.
He has followed up his internationally acclaimed interpretations of Chopin's music, as well as his orchestration of Rachmaninoff's Trio Elegiaque, with a completed version of the composer's long-delayed and ultimately unfinished Third Piano Concerto in A major, Op.46. This beautiful work is now a worthy companion to the two celebrated concertos completed by Chopin.
The Chopin Third Concerto is published by Theodore Presser Company of Philadelphia. It was premiered in 1999 to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Chopin, with Kogosowski as soloist, under the baton of maestro Neeme Jarvi, with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
The Chopin correspondence is full of hints about a Third Piano Concerto that never surfaced as a complete autograph manuscript. Letters written by the composer, his father, his publishers and pupils all make mention of such a work from late 1830 until 1841. In letters to his publisher, Chopin identified the seldom-performed solo work Allegro de Concert, Op.46, which was eventually published in 1841, as the first movement of his Third Concerto, and is reported to have sent the music to a colleague in Poland saying, "This is the very first piece I shall play in my first concert upon returning home to a free Warsaw." That opportunity unfortunately never came.
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A throwback to the brilliant virtuoso style of Chopin's concert works during his youthful years as a virtuoso pianist in Warsaw, Vienna, and the early days in Paris, the Allegro was most likely composed in the early 1830s, shortly after the two well-known concertos, in F minor and E minor. Its style and structure readily suggest its adaptability to a succession of contrasting solo and orchestral sections mandatory for a concerto of the period. Concertos were occasionally performed in part or whole as solo pieces - at Chopin's Paris debut concert in February 1832 at the Salle Pleyel, he performed the F minor concerto as a solo - and Chopin is thought to have performed the Allegro of the new concerto as a solo at a soiree given by his Paris publisher Maurice Schlesinger in 1834.
Building on these facts, Alan Kogosowski has orchestrated the Allegro de Concert - he is not the first to have done so - also filling out its formal structure with a second subject taken from the introductory section. He has employed an orchestral ensemble identical to Chopin's two published concertos, with the addition of a second trombone. For the finale, Kogosowski made a calculated and educated leap of imagination to choose the glittering Bolero in A minor/major (same key as the Allegro - an unusual one for Chopin), Op.19, which is a solo piece of the same period - 1834 - one that fits into no category, as do virtually all of Chopin's works. It has a rondo form typical of that found in the finale of a concerto, and a ready-made cadenza. It provides a fitting conclusion to a beautiful work that would otherwise have remained unperformed and hardly known. |
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World premiere with Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi, October 8, 1999; broadcast on National Public Radio |
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