Music Discussion thread

[Froge]

Attention: Chronofrog



I recently heard Rimsky-Korsakov's piano concerto for the first time and was totally blown away by the stunning orchestration (no surprise) and how exciting it was. I came across some quite negative opinions on it on a particular YouTube video that caused me some confusion. It's not exactly diminishing my enjoyment of it, but it has gotten me thinking and am curious what your thoughts are, as you are probably far better versed in piano literature than I am. Here it is:









Honestly, I really am not impressed with the main theme that much but I think Rimsky-Korsakov does quite amazing things with it and the piano part is amazingly inspired I think. Anyway, read some of the comments and you'll see what I'm talking about. They seem to be fringe opinions but they got me thinking anyway. I'm not familiar with Liszt's concerti well enough to judge, but somebody complained that it echoes those too much. While Rimsky-Korsakov's concerto is dedicated to Liszt I honestly I cannot hear the supposed unoriginality at all. It seems to be more of a homage and stylistic reference than any type of plagiarism.



Anyway, I mainly wanted you to hear what I consider to be a pretty freaking awesome concerto, and hopefully some good discussion can come of it.

After listening to the whole piece and briefly looking over the piano part, I can probably say that a valid criticism of the concerto is that the piano is all over the place. It's made up of a ton of arpeggios and octave slides, which might be impressive to play but is indeed very "Lisztian." Not that Liszt is a bad composer, but he's definitely quite famous for being a showoff composer, and spamming arpeggios is something that does appear quite stunning to the audience.

What is rather good about this concerto is the orchestration, not that that's a surprise (as you've already mentioned). In many portions of the piece, particularly at the beginning and also at the andante section that starts somewhere after 6:00, the orchestra accompanies the piano beautifully. The style of the concerto actually feels very modern - I was reminded of the feel of a lot of modern soundtracks as I listened to it, and an in-depth analysis would probably complement my views. Which means that the main reason why people may dislike the piece is that it simply isn't suitable to compare with the other romantic (or post-romantic) composers of Korsakov's era.

But the main reason is that the piano isn't spectacular, comparatively speaking.