Talk:Piano Concerto (Grieg)

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I heard Olga Kern play this piece up at the Bear Valley Music Festival in August 2005, and I totally fell in love with this music. All three movements are a pleasure with not a wasted or idle note. If you get a chance to see Olga play this, do so... she brings the house down. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.233.198.14 (talk • contribs) 02:37, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Edmund Neupert

I was surprised to read that Neupert was the soloist at the premiere, but this seems to be stated in many places so I assume it's now the received wisdom. I'd always thought it was Grieg himself who played the premiere. That's what Slonimsky and Grove 5 both say.

• Webster's New World Dictionary of Music (Slonimsky; later ed. Richard Kassel, published 1998) says "He [Grieg] played the solo part in the world premiere of his Piano Concerto in Copenhagen (1869), thus establishing himself as a major composer at age 25".
• Grove 5 (reprinted 1966, admittedly getting on a bit now, but I don't have any later Grove) says of the concerto "Its first performance took place at Copenhagen on 3 Apr. 1869 with the composer as soloist".

And Grove 5 has no article on Edmund Neupert at all, which is surprising if Neupert was compared favourably with Liszt in his time, and was even said to have composed the 1st movement cadenza himself.

I can only conclude that more recent research has discovered who the real soloist was. Can anyone comment on this? -- JackofOz 04:41, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Curiously, I am unable to find anything in the current Grove online about the premiere: normally they have that stuff in the works list at the end of the composer's article. A trip to a library may be necessary to get to the bottom of this. I find various things on the internet, most of which support the idea that Neupert first played it on April 3, 1869 in Copenhagen (for example, this). I would look at one of the biographies/biographical studies --for example R. Matthew-Walker: Edvard Grieg: a Biographical Study (Kenwyn, 1993), or K. Falch Johannessen: Edvard Grieg (Bergen, 1993 -- that one is probably in Norwegian). Antandrus (talk) 15:25, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, before I posted this query I did a bit of research and found many references to it being Neupert. But I'm still curious why it was, at least until 1998, thought to have been Grieg if that was not actually the case. My theory - which is all it is - is that Grieg planned to play the premiere, and had playbills and programmes etc printed with his name on them as soloist, but other matters intervened and he had to arrange for Neupert to take over at the last minute, and didn't have time to issue amended programmes and playbills. That printed material, in the absence of any contradictory documentation, would have been prima facie evidence to lexicographers like Slonimsky and Grove that Grieg was the soloist. Yet a newspaper critique of the performance would surely have mentioned Neupert if he had in fact been the soloist, and Slonimsky knew all about critics and their propensity for venom (do you know his Lexicon of Musical Invective?), so I'd be surprised if he didn't track such a review down - assuming there was one - to see what it might have contained. If Slonimsky turns out to have been wrong, this would be one of the rare times that I've ever discovered him to be in error (some others I can recall being the date of Leoncavallo's birth, and the date of Dame Clara Butt's death). -- JackofOz 05:25, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Mitchell reference

A couple of months ago, I made this edit, noting that this was the first recorded concerto, and citing Mark Lindsey Mitchell's Virtuosi: A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists I've since read the entire book, and my take is that much of it is speculative (particularly, but not exclusively, in the area of the sexual orientation of various performers and writers) and not particularly scholarly. I don't doubt its veracity on this particular point, particularly since I had also found other sources such as the Naxos site that's alreary cited, but with the misgivings I have about the book as a whole, I'm removing this book as a source. TJRC (talk) 19:51, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Ooh, I bet that must make Mitchell feel real lousy. Having the reliability of his book questioned by Wikipedia, the paragon of credibility! Willi Gers07 (talk) 18:32, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it's kind of being turned down by the ugliest girl in the bar. TJRC (talk) 21:57, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Key signature missing from music example.

Hallo. Just thought I'd point out that the example of music given from the second movement is lacking its key signature. Being in Db major, it should have 5 flats, so having none makes the music appear to be (approximately) in D minor - this makes a big difference to the way it would sound.

Perhaps someone knows how to correct this. M.J.E. (talk) 08:12, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

User:Egemont created this file. He didn't post the code used to generate it. Perhaps he still has a copy which he could tweak.DavidRF (talk) 13:03, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I think it would be best to replace the example altogether with the actual main theme of the second movement. The part quoted here is a middle section, a development of the opening flourish. I would hardly call it a "theme" at all. TIARABAMUN (talk) 15:02, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

I second removing the picture. ~GMH talk to me 04:04, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Picture of 2nd movement

Picture of 2 movement theme lacks all flats. Better without it then with such a misleading image, probably? 85.30.246.8 (talk) 13:49, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, the D-flat key signature is missing (five flats). Plus, it looks like the triplet/"fivelet" groupings of the 64th notes are lost as well. Too bad the original poster didn't include the lilypond code that was used to generate the image.DavidRF (talk) 15:02, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

3rd movement tempo markings

Might anyone have access to authoritative tempo markings for the third movement of the concerto? The article presently reads

• "Allegro moderato molto e marcato - Andante quasi - Presto".

I'm looking at several discs:

• Lupu/Previn/LSO is truncated, giving only "Allegro moderato molto e marcato"; likewise,
• Perahia/Davis/Bavaria Radio has exactly the same truncated listing;
• Lipatti/Galliera/Philharmonia gives "Allegro moderato e marcato - Andante maestoso" (omitting "molto"); and
• Rubinstein/Ormandy/Philadelphia gives "Allegro moderato molto e marcato - Quasi presto - Andante maestoso".

I suspect this last may be the one that most fully and accurately reflects the score, and that the WP article listing is garbled. Milkunderwood (talk) 08:03, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

You're right, the Rubinstein is correct. It matches Steinberg's concerto book as well as the scores. These extensions aren't really necessary. An anon added this just a few months ago. They don't hurt, though, and if we're going to have them they might as well be correct.DavidRF (talk) 17:21, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing it. Milkunderwood (talk) 20:43, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Spurious B sharp in opening section

As the title says: the B# should be natural.--Phil Holmes (talk) 16:15, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Contestants of the Oslo Grieg Society Competition for Composers

There is a section of this article about Grieg's unfinished Second Piano Concerto, and there were only the names of two contestants which composed a concerto based on the sketches. This section was rather short and undetailed. So, on 4 November 2017, I added the name of other contestants wit the titles of their respective works, including the winner of the competition. On 7 January 2018, another user deleted all the text I had added, without explaining the reason. I can understand that this has no direct link with Grieg's A minor Piano Concerto, but in this caes just mentionning the name of two random contestants is arbitrary and illogical. User:Corentin Boissier —Preceding undated comment added 20:42, 14 March 2018 (UTC)