Allegro de concert (Chopin)

It has a curious place in the Chopin canon, and while its history is obscure, the evidence supports the view, shared by Robert Schumann and others, that it started out as the first movement of a projected third piano concerto, of which the orchestral parts are either now non-existent or were never scored at all.

That same year he wrote that he was planning a concerto for two pianos and orchestra, and would play it with his friend Tomasz Napoleon Nidecki if he managed to finish it.

[6] Technical difficulties include dense musical textures, complex and light finger work, massive leaps of left hand chords, trills and scales in double notes, and difficult octaves.

Those who have recorded it include Heinrich Neuhaus, Claudio Arrau, Nikolai Demidenko, Garrick Ohlsson, Nikita Magaloff, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Roger Woodward.

[9]) The work received one of its rare public performances at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the early 1980s as the opening work for a 'quasi orchestral' solo piano recital by British pianist Mark Latimer that ended with only the second London performance of the equally demanding Concerto for Solo Piano by Charles-Valentin Alkan.

Some attempts have been made to score the Allegro de concert for piano and orchestra as probably originally intended by Chopin.

[6] This version was first played by the Dutch pianist Marie Geselschap in New York City, with an orchestra conducted by Anton Seidl.

The world premiere recording of this version was by Michael Ponti with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Volker Schmidt-Gertenbach.

Austrian pianist Ingolf Wunder orchestrated and recorded it with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra in 2015 for Deutsche Grammophon.