It was written for the pianist William Howard, who first performed the work with the BT Scottish Ensemble at the Spitalfields Festival in London on 12 June 1997.
She continued:But knowing of William's performances of such smale [sic] scale concertos as the Mozart K 449 with as few as five strings in the accompanying orchestra, I was inspired to write him a contemporary piece which similarly lives in the space between chamber music and bravura-filled spectacle.
Tom Service of The Guardian called it a "pocket-sized compression of a big classical form into just 15 minutes, scored for piano and string ensemble," adding, "Weir somehow manages to create music that sounds completely new from the utterly familiar elements of a held chord in the strings and a melody high up in the piano.
"[2] Reviewing a recording of the concerto, the music critic Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times similarly remarked, "Ms. Weir's 1997 Piano Concerto, while paying homage to the delicacy of Mozart's smaller-scaled concertos, shows her in her most audacious mode from the start: wispy lyrical lines in the piano are cushioned by pungent chamber orchestra chords, until the piano turns agitated and a rhythmic bout breaks out among all the players.
"[3] Arnold Whittall of Gramophone described it as "another exercise in puncturing pretension, making strong points about how both lyrical and brittle textures can interact with folk-like idioms in ways where nothing seems diluted or bland.