General Observations Regarding All Three Concertos

As of this writing Samuel Adler has composed seventeen concertos for thirteen different instruments or instrumental combinations, including a Concerto for Orchestra; the piano is the only instrument to be given three concertos. All three bear Adlerian signatures but each has aspects that are unique to itself: for instance, the way it begins.

Of all the decisions necessary for any composer of a concerto, one of the most crucial is when and how the soloist will enter. After all, this is part of the theater inherent in the concerto medium. Mozart had many ideas about how to do this. There’s the casual entrance, as in K. 467, when the pianist appears unobtrusively and seems to warm up and settle himself before getting down to business. In both K. 466 and K. 491 the piano, after a long orchestral exposition, enters with its own, brand-new theme. K. 271 surprises the listener when the soloist suddenly displaces the orchestra in the second measure. Beethoven’s innovations run from beginning quietly with the piano alone (no. 4) to the “Emperor’s” grand cadenza at the beginning between orchestral harmonic pillars of I, IV, V7, I. More ideas from the nineteenth century run from the dramatic, as in the Grieg concerto, where the pianist’s bravura solo display is introduced by an exciting timpani roll, and in Schumann’s, where the pianist jumps in after just one note in the orchestra, to Brahms’s second concerto, which begins calmly with a horn solo and the pianist joins a measure afterward as accompanist. All the above solutions to the when-and-how questions appear in famous and well-loved concertos and probably for that very reason we tend not to appreciate the creative decision-making that went into them. As we will see, all three Adler concertos begin with the pianist playing alone, but each of these beginnings is unique.

The piano begins the First Concerto in an improvisatory way, marked “Slow and very free” and lasting for nearly a minute. The first sounds are an upward arpeggio leading to repeated high F♯s. With every repetition or shortening or lengthening of this “signal,” the piano seems to be sending ever-more-demanding calls out into the silence, only to subside into quiet resignation and die away to ppp.