Warsaw Concerto

The Warsaw Concerto is a single-movement piano concerto written for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight (also known under the later title Suicide Squadron). It was written by British composer Richard Addinsell. The orchestration was by another Briton, Roy Douglas.

The film's love-story plot revolves around the fictional composer of the piece, a piano virtuoso and "shell-shocked" combat pilot, who is a refugee in England from the World War II occupation of Poland and considers returning to Poland to rejoin the war. The actor, Anton Walbrook, was an accomplished amateur pianist, so his hands are seen playing in the film, but in fact the music on the soundtrack is played by an uncredited pianist, Louis Kentner.

The film-makers wanted something in the style of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini or the Second and Third Piano Concertos, but were unable to persuade Rachmaninoff himself to write a new piece or to afford to obtain the rights for any of these existing pieces.

Arrangements, adaptations, quotes and samples

• The theme of the Concerto is borrowed in a popular-music love song whose lyrics include "The world outside will never know..." recorded by The Four Coins. The Concerto theme charted at #18 on UK Singles chart in January 1959, as "The World Outside" by Ronnie Hilton, a very popular singer in the UK. It was also recorded by The Four Aces
• In 1999 US Rapper DMX sampled the Concerto on the single "What's my name", which was the first release from his US nº 1 album ...And Then There Was X
• José Carreras recorded the Concerto as the opening track on his 1999 album Pure Passion
• Gonzalo Rubalcaba, the Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz pianist and composer, recorded a Latin arrangement of the Warsaw Concerto in 2005
• Richard Clayderman covered the song with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the album Concerto, which was released in 1989
• The music was used in the film, The Sea Wolves (1980), with Addinsell's themes arranged by Roy Budd

Other popular culture references

• Spike Milligan repeatedly refers to the piece in his autobiography Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971) and the subsequent books in the series as 'the bloody awful Warsaw Concerto'.
• The Concerto is frequently used in championship figure skating (especially in Japan).

External links

• Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto Analysis and description of Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto
• Composers of the Week - Addinsell and Noel Coward
• Dangerous Moonlight at the Internet Movie Database