In this, the second of the concerts they are to give during the Festival, the highly-regarded NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, conducted by Alan Gilbert, will first accompany the Polish pianist Rafał Blechacz (who won the 15th International Chopin Competition in 2005) in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 in E minor, Opus 11. After the interval, the orchestra will play the Symphony No 1 in C minor, Opus 68, by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). From 19:00 to 19:40 there will be a pre-concert talk (in Turkish) by Feyzi Erçin and İris Şentürker entitled ‘Chopin: Can Music Be a Competition?’.
Frédéric Chopin wrote his Piano Concerto No 1 in 1830, when he was 20 years old. It was first performed in Warsaw, with the composer himself as soloist, during one of the ‘farewell’ concerts he gave before leaving Poland. This concerto was actually written after his Piano Concerto No 2, but was the first of the two to be published. Programme notes by Dr. Michael Fink on the ‘Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra & Music School’ website tell us that ‘There is no cadenza in the first movement … but the piano part, which plays almost ceaselessly after it enters, is like a continuing cadenza. … The slow movement Romance is nocturne-like, a genuine character piece. … The Rondo finale brings a splash of Polish national flavor to the concerto.’
It took Brahms at least 14 years to write his four-movement Symphony No 1 in D minor; he himself said it had taken him 21 years – from 1855 to 1876. In fact, it was probably in 1868 that he finally hit on the structure for this, his first work in the symphonic medium. Two reasons for the long delay in the piece’s receiving its final shape may have been (firstly) that Brahms was an extremely self-critical man who destroyed many of his early works, and (secondly) that he was cowed by popular expectations that he would ‘continue Beethoven’s inheritance’, and Beethoven – Brahms’s idol – was a hard act to follow. Much of the material he originally wrote for this symphony was remodelled as his Piano Concerto No 1, which is also in D minor.
