For piano solo with 1 flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns and strings

Allegro con brio
Adagio
Rondo: Molto allegro

Program Notes by Martin Pearlman

With this sparkling concerto, the 24-year-old Beethoven made his debut as a pianist and composer before the Viennese public on March 29, 1795.  According to the Wiener Zeitung, there was "unanimous applause," and the young musician had the honor of performing the concerto later that same year with the esteemed Haydn conducting.

Over the next several years, he continued to play the work as a show piece but revised it several times.  On one memorable occasion, when Beethoven decided to write an entirely new third movement -- the one that he eventually published -- his friend Wegeler reported that "not until the afternoon of the second day before the concert did he write the rondo, and then while suffering from a pretty severe colic which frequently afflicted him... In the anteroom sat four copyists to whom he handed sheet after sheet as soon as it was finished."  Then at the first rehearsal, Beethoven discovered that his piano was tuned a half step lower than the wind instruments, a crisis that required him to transpose his solo part up a half step for that rehearsal.

Although it is called Concerto No. 2, this is the earliest of Beethoven's five piano concertos.  It was written in Bonn, before he moved to Vienna, but, by the time it was published in 1801, his publisher had already issued his next concerto and had called it his Concerto No. 1.  This Bb concerto from his earlier years thus became No. 2 and was given a later opus number.  By then, Beethoven's style was starting to evolve from the Mozartian character of this concerto toward something quite new.  His revisions, even including writing a new third movement, could bring the work only so far toward his current style and his current level of experience.  Thus he told his publisher, "I don't consider it one of my best works" and offered it to him for half the price of his first symphony.

But it is a charming and delightful work with a beautiful slow movement that must have shown off Beethoven's noted cantabile style of playing, as well as a light-hearted, comic finale.  As a great improvisor, Beethoven would have made up his first-movement cadenza on the spot.  The written-out cadenza that has come down to us is one that Beethoven created much later (1809).  With it, he briefly inserts his more advanced style of piano writing into this early concerto.

Boston Baroque Performances

Concerto No. 2 in Bb for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 19

March 4 & 5, 2016
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor

Soloist:
Kristian Bezuidenhout, piano

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