Piano Concerto No.1 in G minor, Op.25

Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in G minor was so popular in its day that Berlioz was moved to make up a story about a piano that got so used to the work that it went on playing the notes long after the pianist had gone home. Nothing would stop it, not even holy water, and when they took an axe to it “that only made matters worse: each piece danced, jumped, frisked about separately - on the floor, between our legs, against the wall, in all directions.”

Mendelssohn was only twenty-two when he wrote it, inspired partly by Chopin’s E minor Piano Concerto, which he had recently heard the composer himself perform in Munich, and partly by the talents of a young pianist called Delphine von Schauroth, to whom the work is dedicated. It is a dashing, smartly turned out concerto with much masculine vigour and charm in the outer movements and a romantic soul in the middle.

In the first movement Mendelssohn avoids the conventional delay before the first entry of the soloist and, after no more than a brief orchestral crescendo, introduces the pianist with a dramatic flourish. Sustaining the heroic mood, the soloist presents the first subject with fistfuls of chords in the right hand and heavy octaves in the left. The orchestra repeats it in a similarly emphatic manner and both of them add brilliant extensions to it. The second subject is a more poetic inspiration for piano, at first in the relative major but then, more expressively, in D flat major. There is little development and the recapitulation is cut short by a brass fanfare that leads, by way of a piano improvisation, into the slow movement. An intimate and tenderly Andante, it was written presumably with the beautiful dedicatee of the work in mind - not least in the middle section, where the Chopin influence shows through most clearly.

Again brass tuckets and a piano improvisation, though in a very different Presto tempo, lead directly into the next movement. Here, in the Molto allegro e vivace, must be the source of the piano keyboard that will not keep still. From its joyous first entry in G major until the work ends in the same key, the soloist scarcely stops to think. There are just two short rests in the piano part. In one the orchestra contrives a modulation to B major, which moves the pianist to suggest a slightly more reflective version of the main theme. In the other the orchestra bumps, almost by accident, into the introductory gesture of the work, reminding the soloist of the poetic second subject of the first movement before, as though of its own accord, the piano “dances, frisks, and jumps” its way through the coda and into the final bars.