Balakirev: Piano Concerto No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. posth. - I. Allegro non troppo

for today's triple post due to my crazy laziness this weekend, three of the russian five (the loser on this one will be, unfortunately, mr. cui, who is so difficult to find music by that it almost seems amazing to me that we even remember that there were the russian five instead of four. maybe someday in the future i will make up for this).

balakirev is almost certainly the next least well-known after cesar cui, perhaps except among pianists. the majority of his repertoire was written for solo piano, and his career was as a mentor (to many composers that we do know rather more well, like rimsky), solo pianist, and musical intellectual. he did a lot to develop the state of musical perception in the public sphere and most of his works have a flair for the nationalistic. his primary influences were tchaikovsky, chopin, and glinka, and he was the only professional musician of the russian five, so he had to be, more or less, their PR man.

this concerto was begun in 1861, but not finished or published until after his death. the first movement was finished by 1862, but he stopped writing it. he picked it up again in 1906 and had not finished the last movement by 1910 when he died. the last movement was written mostly by his friend sergei liapunov, via sketches and directions from balakirev.

here we have what i'm pretty sure is the only recording on youtube... malcolm binns with conductor david lloyd-jones and the english northern philharmonia.


this work is written in basically sonata form. its key is said to refer to that of beethoven eroica, as well as schumann rhenish (also sounds a lot to me like the beginning of beethoven emperor). more or less all of balakirev's music was quite consciously to develop a language of nationalistic music, in a rather all-encompassing way that perhaps is better applied to him than it is for sibelius and grieg, other composers who are often just called "nationalistic." 
the first subject is a folksy motif introduced by an orchestra tutti. the piano comes in at 0:50, with a continuation of that idea, and includes lots of pianistic flourishes. somewhere along the way about 3 minutes in we get hints of themes in g-flat major. development begins at about 4:40.
in sound and development this sounds to me quite a bit like tchaikovsky pc, but dale points out that the orchestration is generally a bit less pristine than it is in tchaikovsky, and that the use of folk material as main melodies a lot more for granted.
the first video ends basically just as the recap is beginning.

it's interesting that this concerto should fall so far out of the limelight when it seems to have much of the pizazz necessary for piano concerti to succeed. give it a listen and see if you think history has been unfair to it.