Piano Concerto No. 2 in B‑Flat Major

When Beethoven offered this concerto for publication in December 1800, he rather dismissively described it as an early work and not one of his best. It began life in the late 1780s, when Beethoven was a teenager in Bonn, but was extensively revised and rewritten. Unlike the Piano Concerto No. 1, Beethoven struggled to finalise it in a way that satisfied him. It reached largely the form we know today in 1798, although most of the music was written before the C major First Piano Concerto. It eventually appeared in late 1801, after that concerto had already been issued as No. 1, so was designated as No. 2. A modest work with small orchestral forces (no clarinets, trumpets or drums), this is the most Mozartian of Beethoven’s five piano concertos, although numerous touches signal the composer’s individuality. The shift to the distant key of D flat for the second theme in the orchestral opening, for example, was a novel tonal scheme. As with the Piano Concerto No. 1, Beethoven improvised a cadenza, and finally wrote one down in 1809, so the style and larger compass of the keyboard barely gel with the rest of the work. The subsequent two movements also follow the same template as the First Piano Concerto: a long-breathed slow movement with decorative solo writing precedes a good-humoured finale, full of comic rhythmic and harmonic interplay including, toward the end, landing briefly in the “wrong” key of G major.