Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor

Among Mendelssohn’s myriad talents—he was, in addition to being a composer of striking originality, a gifted linguist, watercolourist and poet—was his mastery of a number of instruments, principally the piano. He was the soloist at the premieres of both of his mature piano concertos, works in which he exploited his gift for glittering fingerwork as well as lyricism of the utmost pathos. The Piano Concerto No. 2 was composed for performance at the Birmingham Festival of 1837; like the Violin Concerto, which he began composing the following year, it is in three movements joined by linking passages. The work opens with a furtive falling orchestral figure that is answered by cadenza-like passages from the piano, developing into a large-scale “Allegro” with a nervous energy that fully bears out the expressive direction in the score, appassionato. The hymnlike “Adagio” perhaps reflects the mingling of sorrow and joy felt following the death of his father and his marriage and honeymoon, which all occurred shortly before the work’s composition. And the finale resolves all the ambiguities of the previous two movements in a joyously sunny triple-time dance.