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The MacDowell No. 2 - it has everything! I first heard this piece 35 years ago and it is stil one of my favorites. Dramatic, lyrical, playful. Technically challenging. Another one to consider.

Yeah, I like it a lot. Dvorak was a wonderful orchestrator. The piano part's good, too.

Richter/Kleiber made a wonderful recording of this concerto.

Even though I like the piece in some ways, the Dvorak concerto suffers from awful structural problems. It's just a string of pretty sections with intermittent flash and "climaxes" that just come out of nowhere.

The Rubinstein 4th concerto is simply no good. It lacks a single interesting melody, it's formally predictable, and it isn't even very original piano writing (nothing here that Liszt hadn't already done). The only reason this piece still gets mentionned is because Hoffmann liked it (and of course he would be partial to a gift to him from his famous teacher).

Saint-Saens 4 just gets SO irritating with that one little motive repeated 1000 times in the first movement. Who wants to learn all those notes for so little musical reward?

Weber Konzertstucke--yuck!

In general, the ten or so 19th-century concerti that we hear over and over again really are the creme of that particular crop; I think time has chosen its favorites wisely. That Hyperion series "The Romantic Piano Concertos," which seems to have more than a few listeners on this thread, has tried to do a great thing by reviving interest in forgotten repertoire, and was probably inspired by the current trend toward neo-romanticism, but it's definitely fooled a lot of people into thinking that those pieces are genuinely interesting, independently of historical interest.

PianoJohn does have a point, and time somehow has filtered out those good and well known ones from those less known or forgotten.

Still, it's refreshing to hear something other than the usual piano concerti, even if they're perhaps a cut below the greats. Listening to the exact same concerti (great as they are) over and over again gets boring - I enjoy hearing something different now and then.

In one of Rachmaninoff's letters:
"Went to a concert last night and heard a terrible concerto by some American composer named Dowell..."

Well, I like it. In my earlier days I collected scores of unknown concertos:
*Albeniz
*Brull 2 (delightful)
*d'Albert
*Czerny a minor (gotta identify the key since he wrote 1 concerto about 200 times!)
*Dohnanyi 1 & 2
*Hummel a min. & b-min.
*Kuhlau
*Moszkowski
*Raff
*Reinecke 1
*Scharwenka 2
*Sgambatti
*Weber 1 & 2

Whole slew of others I can't recall at the moment.
All of them gathering dust in my closet.

Hmmm... A closet concerto collector. Well, we won't tell anyone if you don't want us to.

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush...

In September of 2005 I posed a question to this forumon concerning Piano Concertos. I received some helpful answers to my questions which prompted me to purchase many piano concertos written by composers with whom I was unfamiliar. The "Hyperion" series was a revelation which led me to the music of Xaver Scharwenka. His Piano Concerto #3 in C# minor, op 80, has become my favorite Piano Concerto (Especially the 1st and 3rd movement). I love this music and I am trying to find the score transcribed for two pianos. So far with no results. (Any help appreciated!)
If you are unfamiliar with this composition, I urge you to give it a listen. I love it! I hope you do too!

Best Wishes,
Jim Bottom

Yeah, plus the second one is one of the few (only, possibly!) 'happy' pieces that he wrote - and even then it's debatable!

I wasn't impressed either. I agree with PianoJohn. Though I heard it's treacherously difficult.

Czerny's Concerto in C Major for Piano 4 Hands, Op.153.

This is music so delightful it is guaranteed to make you smile.

Richard Andinsell (spelling?)- Warsaw Concerto...

Beautiful music... quite similar to Rachmaninov I think.

*laughs* It's not marketing so much as popularity. Due to music being an art form, it is subject to popularity contests. What is most popular gets played more often. The question you've got to start asking is, "Why are the more-played concertos more popular than the less-played concertos?" And the obvious follow-up, "Is it because they are better?"

To the last question, I would answer no. They are more memorable, but 'better' requires some concrete to compare to, and art is certainly not meant to be concrete or perfect.

Joey: Is your Moszkowsi concerto transcribed for second piano, but any chance? If it is, whats the publisher? I'm going to try to get my music store to dig it up from somewhere--they're pretty good at that. Its somehow become one of my favorite concertos.

MacDowell 2nd (the "terrible" concerto Rachmaninoff complained about must have been the 1st) -- Wild and Cliburn both do it well; and

Hummel's two concertos -- Hough's recording is magnificent.

I don't know how frequently played the Bartok concertos are (I'd be glad to be enlightened on that), but while we're on the topic of concertos, I'll just chime in that Bartok 3 has a really nice 2nd movement. (I didn't want to dig up the old concerto second movements thread.)

Also Hummel's concerti are quite nice. Among the 20th century ones, Pancho Vladigerov has 5 of them, the first and the 3rd are quite good.

Anybody listened to Selim Palmgren's piano concertos? I listened to some of them years ago (only once), and can't recall much anything about them...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000026CP8/

The Moszkowski Concerto is published by Peters in a 2-piano score and is available from SheetMusicPlus.