Piano Concerto No.2 in D minor, Op.40

Five weeks before he was to perform his Second Piano Concerto at the Birmingham Festival Mendelssohn confessed that he had written “not a note.” But, of course, when he made his much anticipated appearance in the newly built Town Hall on 5 August 1837, he was able to deliver a concerto as elegantly turned out - from its seriously stylish beginning to its characteristically playful finale - as any of his other compositions.

It is true that the Piano Concerto in D minor is not as inspired as the long considered Violin Concerto he was to complete seven years later and that it is not as fresh as the delightful Piano Concerto in G minor written six years earlier. On the other hand, it is not only more mature than its predecessor but also more romantic. The song-without-words intimacy of the second subject of the first movement and the thoroughly German inwardness of the slow movement - which is a marked advance on the modish poetry of the Andante of the Concerto in G minor - are particularly endearing characteristics of the work. At one point in each of the first two movements, moreover, the soloist treats the lyrical material with gestures so broad as to anticipate the heroic manner of the large-scale concertos of late-romantic composers not yet born.

Although there is no cadenza in either of Mendelssohn’s two piano concertos, the Concerto in D minor offers compensatory opportunities for the soloist to expand in the fantasia-like introduction to the first movement and in the transitional passage between the Allegro appassionato and the Adagio. As in the Violin Concerto and the First Piano Concerto, the third movement also follows without a break.