Ernst Linko's
1st Piano Concerto (in d minor, Op. 4) was composed in 1916 and premiered on 13 March 1917 at the VFD house ballroom in Turku. Linko played the solo part with Karl Ekman conducting the city orchestra. The premiere of this quite muscular and energetic concerto was well received, prompting positive encouragement towards the then young pianist-composer career's future. Following my transcription of Linko's 3
rd Piano Concerto some years ago, all of the composer's piano concerti are now listenable either in live recordings (2 & 4) or digital realisations (1 & 3)!
I don't normally work on composers not in public domain, but I was ok'd to post the video with score online from the finnish copyright agency, Teosto.
As this concerto was on the shorter side, I went to the extra effort in preparing the full score for the video: this makes its first publication! In addition to the full score, there exists a partial score of a two-piano arrangement of the concerto as well as some drafts and a set of performance parts in MS, which I was able to study when preparing my edition.
An excerpt from a review of the concerto's premiere describes the work in the following way:
QuoteThe [d minor] concerto appeared as a composition written with remarkable agility and the instincts of a talented musician, in which – in a pleasant form and in an absolutely excellent way for a young composer – light and shadow, intensity and tenderness vary, with melancholy almost always being the undercurrent of the composition. The piano part stands in general in a splendid position towards the orchestra, which for the most part sings its beautiful, pleasantly colored, almost wistful tunes. The concerto gives good hope for its author's future as a composer.
YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/qyE8unDXCBA?si=3D9Uv_ktmvivfBfL (https://youtu.be/qyE8unDXCBA?si=3D9Uv_ktmvivfBfL)
Great work, Tuomas! But be careful, your video was mislabeled by YT as containing AI generated content. Recently I heard that YT would strike channels which contains too much AI-generated content. So it's always good to avoid being mislabeled...
Thanks for the heads-up! There are quite a lot of settings for when uploading a video to the platform, and I think I accidentally chose that AI option. It should be corrected, now.
Indeed it is now corrected
Hmm, that setting seems to be recently added. I wonder if it's worth going back through all of my videos and checking the "No" box on every one, seems like kind of a lot of busywork.
Though in the spirit of full disclosure, I did in a few cases use AI to generate the thumbnail portraits when no real image of the composer was available, but I always say when I did that in the description, and I feel like that's a forgivable amount of AI usage considering the music is the main draw, and I will never use Generative AI for that.