Piano Concerto, Op. 16

A timpani roll begins pp and grows louder. The piano enters with fortissimo chords that descend from the top of the keyboard to the bottom, then rise in arpeggios to a chord held under a fermata. The Norwegian scholar Finn Benestad described these bars as Grieg’s calling card.

After a pause the orchestra begins softly. The woodwinds play the first theme, a march-like tune over syncopated strings, and the piano soon repeats it with arpeggios. Grieg drafted the concerto at Søllerød in Denmark in the summer of 1868.

The music modulates to C major, and the cellos play the second theme. On Liszt’s suggestion, the first edition of 1872 gave it to a solo trumpet. Grieg later returned it to the cellos, as he had first scored it.

As a student in Leipzig, Grieg heard Clara Schumann play her husband’s Piano Concerto in A minor, which also opens with a flourish for the soloist. About fifty years later he wrote in his diary: “Every tempo stands indelibly stamped on my soul.”

The development fades and the first theme returns in A minor, played pp in chords by the piano. Later the second theme comes back in A major, a minor third below its first appearance in C major.

In Rome in 1870 Franz Liszt sight-read the concerto from the manuscript, talking and nodding as he played. Handing it back, he told Grieg to carry on, that he had what it takes, and not to let them frighten him.

The orchestra stops and the pianist plays a cadenza alone, in heroic style. At the première in Copenhagen on 3 April 1869 the soloist, Edmund Neupert, reported: “Already after the cadenza in the first movement the audience broke into a real storm.”

The coda opens with a new melody, played by oboes and bassoons. The orchestra then drives the movement to its close.