# recommend me some piano concerti



## EmperorOfIceCream (Jan 3, 2020)

Would love to have some recommendations on 20th/21st century piano concerti to listen to that are not as well known. I have a never-ending hunger for the genre . . . My favorites of the 20th/21st century are Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds, Ravel's piano concerti, Bartok's, Schoenberg, Finnissy 3, Xenakis's Synaphai and Keqrops, Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques, Ligeti, Chin, Carter's Interventions, and Abrahamsen's 2 piano concerti. I guess the things I value most are rhythmic richness and complex textures, so let me know if you know of any other good piano concerti like this


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Blacher and Copland have concertos similar to the style of neoclassical Stravinsky.
Hindemith 4 Temperamente


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EmperorOfIceCream said:


> Would love to have some recommendations on 20th/21st century piano concerti to listen to that are not as well known. I have a never-ending hunger for the genre . . . My favorites of the 20th/21st century are Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds, Ravel's piano concerti, Bartok's, Schoenberg, Finnissy 3, Xenakis's Synaphai and Keqrops, Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques, Ligeti, Chin, Carter's Interventions, and Abrahamsen's 2 piano concerti. I guess the things I value most are rhythmic richness and complex textures, so let me know if you know of any other good piano concerti like this


Try to find Helmut Lachenmann's Ausklang, Aimard is especially successful with it I think. Also Roger Reynold's Traces and possibly his The Angel of Death too. And now that I think of it, Michel Levinas's concerto pour un piano espace.


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## Simon Moon (Oct 10, 2013)

EmperorOfIceCream said:


> Would love to have some recommendations on 20th/21st century piano concerti to listen to that are not as well known. I have a never-ending hunger for the genre . . . My favorites of the 20th/21st century are Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds, Ravel's piano concerti, Bartok's, Schoenberg, Finnissy 3, Xenakis's Synaphai and Keqrops, Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques, Ligeti, Chin, Carter's Interventions, and Abrahamsen's 2 piano concerti. I guess the things I value most are rhythmic richness and complex textures, so let me know if you know of any other good piano concerti like this


Your taste in piano concertos is extremely close to mine.

A couple off the top of my heard are:

Samuel Barber - Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 38
Magnus Lindberg - Piano Concerto No. 1 and No. 2
Joan Tower - Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven)


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## Simon Moon (Oct 10, 2013)

I also like Ernst Krenek's later 2 concerti:

Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 107 (1946)
Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 123 (1950)


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## Simon Moon (Oct 10, 2013)

Oh, and how can I forget the amazing works by Charles Wuorinen?!

His first and fourth piano concertos are my favorite, but they are all great.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

You might check out Birtwistle's Antiphonies; Benjamin's Duet for Piano and Orchestra; CAP-KO by Eotvos and Furrer's Piano Concerto - fine works all.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Tippett (not incredibly outre, but a masterpiece)


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## gvn (Dec 14, 2019)

EmperorOfIceCream said:


> I guess the things I value most are rhythmic richness and complex textures, so let me know if you know of any other good piano concerti like this


_Definitely_ Milhaud's 5 piano concerti, recently recommended by someone on another thread. The phrase "rhythmic richness and complex textures" might have been invented as a description of those.

Rautavaara's 3 piano concerti. It's worth exploring all three, because they're unusually diverse (Ondine's booklet notes shrewdly suggest that this may be because they were written for 3 different soloists with quite different requirements).

Fully agree with many of the above suggestions, too. I thought I would surely be the only person to think of Wuorinen, until I saw Simon Moon's post above!


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Roberto Gerhard
Maurice Ohana
Schnittke
Panufnik
Wellesz
Hindemith


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

*recommend me some piano concerti*

One of my favorites, a winner of the 1959 Pulitzer Prize in Music: *Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 9, by John LaMontaine*. First performed in Washington, D.C. by the National Symphony Orchestra on November 25, 1958. Recorded in 1965 by Composers Recordings Inc. (CRI) ‎- CRI SD 189, with the appropriately named Karen Keys at the piano, with conductor Guy Fraser Harrison leading the Oklahoma City Symphony Orchestra, a vinyl disc long a treasure in my record collection.









Here is an available link of a live recording (mono) from 1959 by Voice of America, featuring soloist Jorge Bolet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch.






The CRI recording is available on at least two other disc versions that I know of. I wish this work were better known. It has remained a favorite piano concerto of mine since the first time I heard it via the CRI recording.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Another earlier (1927) concerto that is easily overlooked but very interesting is the first pc op.14 by Alexander Mosolov (who tragically was later deported and although he came back he could for obvious reason not keep composing in his daring early style).


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

John Ireland's Piano Concerto. Less overtly modernist than some others suggested in this thread, but a fascinating piece.


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## 20centrfuge (Apr 13, 2007)

Of course you've heard Prokofiev 2, which is among my favorite works.

John Adams: Must the Devil have All the Good Tunes? -- is a fun and attractive work that is worth a listen.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EmperorOfIceCream said:


> Finnissy 3


I hadn't heard this before. It's nice, thanks for mentioning. Have you heard this?


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## PeterAccettola (Jun 5, 2021)

I have recently heard a piano concerto by Bohuslav Martinu, his # 4, "Incantation."
It is on a BR Klassik CD with Robert Schumann's concerto played by Ivo Kahanek. 
It is quite good if you are not already familiar with it.


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Horațiu Rădulescu's _The Quest_. It's a rather severe, uncompromising work that may throw you off on a first listen. But it gets better with each successive listen; I think it's one of Rădulescu's best.

CD liner notes:



> Horațiu Rădulescu was one of the truly radical voices in European music today. His art makes an exquisite poetry from the meeting of the scientific and the spiritual. An authentic contemporary composer, Rădulescu had a deep fascination with the "inner life" of musical sound - harmonic scales, scales of unequal intervals corresponding to the partials of the spectrum. His revolutionary approach introduced in 1968-69 - historically for the first time - the spectral language, which was, two thousand years later, a conceptual reply to Pythagoras (see Ocean of Vibrations - the Music of Horațiu Rădulescu by Patrick Szersnovicz, in "Le Monde de la Musique", Paris, November 1988), and a realization of the intuitions of both Hindu and Byzantine music, which, the composer said, "were the closest to natural resonance". Yet at the same time his work manifests a longing for an ancient conception of music's place in the spiritual life of humanity: a longing, as one of his titles puts it, for a "Music ... older than Music".
> 
> Rădulescu's Piano Concerto "The Quest" was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk Frankfurt and the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science and the Arts. It is dedicated to the virtuoso Freiburg pianist Ortwin Stürmer, who gave the first performance, with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lothar Zagrosek, in the Great Hall of the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt on 8 March 1996, preceded on that occasion by Schoenberg's Five Pieces, Op. 16 and Messiaen's Chronochromie. The Quest is the work of a mature artist who has transcended the notoriety and extravagant radicalism of his youth. Born in Bucharest on 7 January 1942, Rădulescu left his native Romania in 1969 for Paris, where he became known as the originator of "spectral music", the techniques for which he developed in a series of compositions beginning in 1969 with Credo for nine celli. Based on the idea of audibly projecting the activity and energy of the various partials, the spectral language took root and now seems one of the most important exits from the serialist stranglehold on contemporary music. Rădulescu developed the technique significantly in the decades since. (See the list below of selected compositions.)
> 
> ...


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> I hadn't heard this before. It's nice, thanks for mentioning. Have you heard this?


This concerto's pretty good, but there's an essential video component to it; this is just the audio. The whole thing's on the 2014 Donaueschingen set.


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Bernhard Lang's _Monadologie XXXIV (Loops for Ludvik)_. Lang loops sections from Beethoven's 3rd PC and transforms them simultaneously.


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## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

In my view, 20/21st century composers have written more impressive violin concertos than piano concertos, overall, but with a good number of notable exceptions. What follows is a list of piano concertos that are (at least) worth hearing, in my opinion; although naturally I've liked some concertos more than others, and have placed an asterisk* next to them (& I've also included some that I don't necessarily care for myself, but have added in order to give a more comprehensive overview):

I. The better known piano concertos,

--Serge Prokofiev, *Piano Concertos 1-5, nos. 2 & 5 are particular favorites of mine:









--Maurice Ravel, *Piano Concerto in G Major, and the *Piano Concerto for the left hand: 




--Dmitri Shostakovich, *Piano Concertos 1 & 2: 




--Arnold Schoenberg, Piano Concerto, Op. 42: 




--Bela Bartok, Piano Concertos 1-3: 





















--Samuel Barber, Piano Concerto, Op. 38 (I prefer Barber's Violin Concerto, which is one of my favorite concertos of the 20th century): 
John Browning, with Szell: 



John Browning, with Slatkin: 




--Manuel de Falla, *Nights in the Gardens of Spain: 




--Igor Stravinsky, Concerto for piano and wind instruments: 




II. The less well known piano concertos,

--Bohuslav Martinu: *Piano Concertos 1-5: 



*Piano Concerto No. 4 "Incantations": 




--Fartein Valen, *Piano Concerto, Op. 44: To date, there have been two recordings of Valen's piano concerto:

1. Pianist Einar Henning Smebye, with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christian Eggen, on BIS, here's a link to the first movement only (as the rest isn't on You Tube): 




2. Pianist Geir Henning Braaten, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, conductor Christian Eggen, on Simax:













--Elliot Carter, *Piano Concerto: 




--Witold Lutoslawski, *Piano Concerto (1987): 




--Frank Martin,
*Piano Concerto No. 1: 



*Piano Concerto No.2: 




--Paul Hindemith, *Piano Concerto (1945): 




--Friedrich Cerha, Piano Concerto (1951-54): 




--Hans Werner Henze:
Piano Concerto No. 2: 

























Piano Concerto No. 1: 





("Tristan" (1973), Preludes for piano, tape, and orchestra: 



)

--Wolfgang Rihm, Piano Concerto No. 2: 




--Einojuhani Rautavaara, 
*Piano Concerto No. 2: 



*Piano Concerto no. 3 "Gift of Dreams": 




--Paavo Heininen, *Piano Concerto No. 2--Heininen has composed 4 piano concertos, so far, but No. 2 is the only one that has received a recording to date, as far as I know. Unfortunately, it's not on You Tube:

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/paavo-heininen-arioso-piano-concerto-no-2-symphony-no-2/459093493
https://www.amazon.com/Paavo-Heinin...+piano+concerto&qid=1623964773&s=music&sr=1-1

--Aarre Merikanto, *Piano Concerto no. 3: 




--Einar Englund, Piano Concertos 1 & 2: 




--Poul Ruders:
*Piano Concerto No. 1: 



*Piano Concerto No. 2:













--Magnus Lindberg, 
*Piano Concerto No. 1: 



Piano Concerto No. 2: 



(Though my favorite concerto by Lindberg, so far, has been his imaginative Violin Concerto No. 1: 



.)

--Esa-Pekka Salonen, *Piano Concerto: 




--Vagn Holmboe--*Piano Concerto: 









--Per Nørgård: *Concerto in due tempi (1996): 




--Hans Abrahamsen, *Piano Concerto No. 1 (2000): 




--Bent Sørenson, *"La Mattina"--his Piano Concerto No. 2 (2009): 




--Kalevi Aho:
Piano Concerto No. 1: 



*Piano Concerto No. 2: 













--Selim Palmgren, Piano Concertos 1-5:

PC 1: 



PC 2 "The River":












PC 3 "Metamorphoses":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqJhnWW2T3Yhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myuy8qVKw-A
PC 4: 



PC 5: https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8338841--palmgren-piano-concertos-nos-4-5

--Eduard Tubin, Concertino for piano orchestra: 




--Alexander Tcherepnin, Piano Concertos 1-6: 
*Piano Concerto No. 4 "Fantaisie": 




--Darius Milhaud, 
Piano Concerto No. 1: 



*Piano Concerto No. 3: 



Le Carnival d'Aix, Op. 83b (Fantasy for piano and orchestra after the ballet Salade, Op. 83): 




--Andre Jolivet, *Piano Concerto (1951): 




--Walter Piston, *Concerto for two pianos: 




--Vincent Persichetti, Piano Concerto: 













--William Schuman, Piano Concerto (1942): 




--Howard Hanson, Piano Concerto, Op. 36: 




--John Harbison, Piano Concerto (1978): 




--Ned Rorem, Piano Concerto No. 2: 




--Roger Sessions, *Piano Concerto (1956): 




--Charles Wuorinen, Piano Concerto No. 4: 




--Philip Glass, Piano Concerto No. 2 "After Lewis and Clark":













--John Adams:
"Century Rolls" (1997): 




--Cyril Scott:
Piano Concerto No. 1: 



Piano Concerto No. 2: 




--William Aldwyn: 
Piano Concerto No. 1: 



Piano Concerto No. 2: 




--Edmund Rubbra: *Piano Concerto, Op. 55: 













--Alan Rawsthorne:
*Piano Concerto No. 1: 



*Piano Concerto No. 2: 




--Benjamin Britten: *Piano Concerto, Op. 13: 




--Michael Tippett, *Piano Concerto: 




--Robert Simpson, Piano Concerto (1967): 




--Malcolm Arnold, Concerto for two pianos (three hands) & orchestra, Op. 104 (1969): 




--Alexander Goehr, *Piano Concerto, Op. 33 (1972): 
Daniel Barenboim, piano & conductor: 



Peter Serkin, with Oliver Knussen conducting the London Sinfonietta:









--John McCabe, Piano Concerto No. 2: 




--Michael Finnissy, Piano Concerto No. 2: 




--Thomas Adès, Piano Concerto:


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## Parley (May 29, 2021)

The best twentieth century piano concerto is the Rachmaninov 3 when needed you get over it’s popularity. Has everything a virtuoso piano concerto should have and is played by the greatest pianists.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

In addition to my earlier recommendations (Birtwistle, Eotvos, Furrer etc) it may be worth checking out the three Skalkottas concertos. Here are some links:


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## MrNobody (Jun 9, 2021)

I find Bach's first D minor concerto hands down the greatest. Many good recordings out there, you can't miss. As usual, Bach had it all


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## LeoPiano (Nov 1, 2020)

I'm personally not the biggest fan of 20th-21st century music, because I prefer the romantic style. One concerto that I love that is in-between is Rachmaninoff's 4th Piano Concerto. It has a beautiful blend of flowing melodies and also some more 20th century elements to it. It's also not as well known, unlike his earlier concertos, if you care about that. Michelangeli's recording (on the video that I shared) is my favorite.


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

Szymanowski's 4th symphony is essentially a piano concerto:


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## golfer72 (Jan 27, 2018)

Arnold Bax Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra. Essentially a piano concerto


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

MarkW said:


> Tippett (not incredibly outre, but a masterpiece)


Not OP, but that was a great recommendation. Thank you!

And to OP, not yet mentioned I think, but a very peculiar piano concerto is Busoni's


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