- Composer: Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 -- 30 January 1963)
- Orchestra: Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire
- Conductor: Pierre Dervaux
- Soloists: Francis Poulenc (piano), Jacques Février (piano)
- Year of recording: 1957
Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor, FP 61, written in 1932.
00:00 - I. Allegro ma non troppo
07:47 - II. Larghetto
13:14 - III. Allegro molto
This concerto was commissioned by and dedicated to the Princess Edmond de Polignac and composed over the period of three months in the summer of 1932. The premiere was given on 5 September 1932, at the International Society for Contemporary Music in Venice. Poulenc and his childhood friend Jacques Février were concerto soloists with the La Scala Orchestra, with Désiré Defauw (later conductor of the Chicago Symphony) conducting. Poulenc was gratified by the warm acclaim his work received, and later performed the concerto with Benjamin Britten in England in 1945. The Concerto for Two Pianos is often described as the last work of Poulenc's early period. The composer himself wrote to the Belgian musicologist Paul Collaer: "You will see for yourself what an enormous step forward it is from my previous work and that I am really entering my great period."
The concerto's recurring moto perpetuo, modally inflected figurations are clearly inspired by Poulenc's encounter with a Balinese gamelan at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale de Paris, like so many other works of composers at the time were. Additionally, the work's instrumentation and "jazzy" effects are reminiscent of Ravel's G major Concerto, which was premiered at Paris in January 1932. Inevitably, comparisons have been drawn with Mozart's Concerto in E-flat for two pianos, K. 365, but the slow movement Larghetto's graceful, classically simple melody and gentle, regular accompaniment have reminded some writers of the slow movement of Mozart's C major Piano Concerto, K. 467. Poulenc wrote in a letter to Igor Markevitch, "Would you like to know what I had on my piano during the two months gestation of the Concerto? The concertos of Mozart, those of Liszt, that of Ravel, and your Partita".
