Prokofiev's THIRD.

I mean, listen to the Argerich version and you'll know what I mean. The first movement: there's that first theme which makes you lift your eyes to heaven. Then with the fiery uprising ending in this INCREDIBLE bitingly sarcastic second theme. And that's just the exposition! And HOLY COW! The third movement is SO CRAZY. Banging chords every eight of a second in seemingly random places. And plus, glissandos up and down, up and down. I get a headache just listening to that, BUT I LOOOVE it!

Ravel's Left Hand Concerto is really cool.

That said, I don't really have what could be called a "favorite concerto." They all have their ups and downs and such, but it's impossible for me to choose what would be my absolute favorite.

Haydn's cello concerto No. 2 and Telemann's concerto in G major for viola and string orchestra TWV 51:G9 are two of my favorites

anyone out there that likes the GERSHWIN piano concerto should get the DVD titled Gershwin Night with Ozawa and a jazz trio augmenting the orchestra. Sensational!! any Rachmanonoff fan will enjoy the new CD of his fifth (yes fifth) piano concerto based on his 2nd symphony. it sounds for the world like Rachmaninoff himself is at the piano! both of these items will shake up your little world.

The Jazz trio is not augmenting the orchestra, they are replacing the piano solo part. I find that endeavour to be completely fruitless. If you like "the Gershwin concerto", you should listen to, you guess, "the Gershwin concerto", not a bad arrangement for jazz trio.


It's not "his" fifth piano concerto. He did compose the second symphony, but all the merits of this concerto go to Alexander Warenberg. That's why the work is known as Piano concerto "Nº 5", or "Symphony Nº 2, arranged as piano concerto, by A. Warenberg".

Let me add, Saint Saens Second.

For piano:

Bach 1 (D minor)
Prokofiev 2
Beethoven 3
Rachmoaninov 2
Brahms 2
Mozart 20
Tchaikovsky 1
Chopin 1
Schumann

Elgar's violin concerto

I just read back through the whole of this thread and discovered that no one has mentioned Elgar's violin concerto! The cello concerto comes up time and again, though not the violin concerto. But Elgar's violin concerto has haunted me for years and years. I think it's true to say that a little knowledge of certain aspects of Elgar's life makes it more accessible, more poignant, but even without that I'd have expected it to win admirers here. Some may think it's too long, at 45-50 minutes, but the extra length is due almost entirely to the extraordinary cadenza with which he closes the work.

The second movement is exquisitely beautiful, and would alone make the piece a favourite for me, but the reason why I go back to it, time and time again, is the great drama that is played out, again and again, between the two 'windflower' themes (as he called them), introduced in the first movement, and taken up again, later. That these themes, different in character but both deeply feminine, had some symbolic significance for Elgar is unquestionable; trying to discover what it is, is another matter. 'Herein is enshrined the soul of .....' Elgar wrote on the score, without telling us who '.....' is. Lady Alice Stuart Wortley is often proposed as the most likely candidates for the 'soul' - Elgar's nickname for her was 'Windflower' - but I don't believe it's so simple. Whoever or whatever is the 'soul', nowhere is it enshrined more mysteriously than in the cadenza.

About 9 minutes into the last movement, Elgar starts to wind it up. We know the finale is coming; we get ready for the end. But no. The momentum fades. Unexpectedly from the strings there comes the sound of something like wind - wind in trees, perhaps, or aeolian harps. It's a strange, haunting sound, and against this background the cadenza (it's an accompanied cadenza) begins. For the next 10 minutes or so the violin takes up again the 'windflower' themes, and explores them as if they represent something remembered that's exquisitely painful, yet loved beyond measure. There are times when the music falters and almost dies, as if no resolution is possible, and yet, finally, some kind of reconciliation is achieved, and the concerto comes to an end in a brisk surge of something like optimism.

The power of it lies in the fact that it somehow seems to tap into something archetypal; something deeper than the mere fact that Elgar was in love with anyone in particular. I think the music is a kind of celebration of the feminine, as a healing essence, tempered by an awareness of its destructive, painful aspect. But all the theories, of course, seem insignificant, once you get involved in the music. Anyway, this is my favourite concerto.

Elgarian, you beat me.

Elgar's violin concerto, even though I'm still comparatively new to it, is to me one of the most powerfully haunting violin concerti out there (along with Sibelius' and Bruch's).

Edit: I'm referring to Bruch's 1st violin concerto, by the way...

What a fantastic trio of works you bring together there! It remains only for me to add, mixed in with the imagined sound of a warm breeze among leaves, memories of things past, and thoughts of things that might have been:

Yes, was that not the theme that Yehudi Menuhin played in such an "English" way (according to Georges Enescu)? I love it.

I don't know - you sent me scurrying off to my Elgar books to check it out, though I've failed to find the reference so far. I chiefly remember it as the theme he sometimes sketched at the beginning of his letters to Alice Stuart Wortley ("Windflower").

For piano or for violin?

Ah, now I think about it, both.

Probably Vivaldi's Seasons with Carmignola/Marcon.