I have a rule to which I stick pretty closely: I don't write about a piece of music until I've heard it three times. That applies whether it's a three-minute pop song or a ninety-minute Mahler symphony (sometime in the next month or two I'm going to say something about his Sixth). After I'd heard this concerto three times I began this post as follows:

"I don't quite know what to say about this concerto. I like it a lot, and in that I seem to be in agreement with a great many people, as Wikipedia says it's frequently performed and recorded, and has been performed 192 times at Carnegie Hall. And yet...I feel that I should like it more. Why? It's the first movement: my head says that I should love it, but my heart doesn't follow along."

But in the process of writing I changed my mind. I kept going back to that first movement to refresh my memory, ended up listening to it twice more, and now I love it. And the whole concerto. 

I can't describe it like the Wikipedia author does:

The first movement opens with the solo piano, playing simple chords in the tonic key before coming to rest on a dominant chord. The orchestra then enters with the same theme, in B major, the major mediant key, which is in a chromatic mediant relationship to the tonic. 

And so on in that vein, and I can't say much more than "ok fine whatever" to most of it. It isn't that I don't understand any of the terms at all--I know what "tonic key" and "dominant chord" mean. But I'm lost at "chromatic mediant relationship." Even if I understand these descriptions, I don't hear them--that is, I don't hear that what was stated in G is restated in B.

Still, I'll risk embarrassment by saying that I'm a little puzzled by that description of the opening. Simple chords? Well, I guess that's right. But what I hear is an energetic and really fairly simple tune presented by the piano alone, so simple that it could almost be called a motif (or in my more familiar vocabulary, a riff or maybe even a lick): only three notes of the scale in a distinctive rhythm: 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 3. (I don't think those accents are really there, but my brain supplies them anyway.) In that respect it made me think of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, the supreme motif in its combination of simplicity and power. Very catchy. 

The orchestra enters and soon gives us a more typical, you might say a more melodious, melody, a lyrical one, and there follows fifteen minutes or so of fascinating and affecting interplay, with that initial rhythm appearing and disappearing throughout. What didn't affect me on those first three hearings somehow blossomed on the next two. It's relatively subdued, by which I mean that it never seems to be striving for passion and grandeur, as Beethoven sometimes seems to be; not that it lacks these, but it's lyrical, in an almost dignified way. And, naturally, continually interesting.

The very brief second movement fascinates me. In fact, on my first couple of hearings I found it far more involving than the first movement. By "very brief" I mean it's a little under five minutes long in the recording I have, the same Alfred Brendel one that I listened to for the first three concertos. (I see that some recordings are around six minutes--I want to hear one of those.) For most of it the piano and the strings (alone, no other instruments) alternate, not playing together at all. The strings play, then stop, and the piano responds. I hear the string part as a sort of doleful march, and didn't know until I read it in the Wikipedia article that it's based on the traditional Dies Irae chant. The piano responds mournfully. It's almost spooky. The strings gradually fade away. The piano sounds more and more as if it's strayed into a Chopin piece, and for a few moments, to my ears, as if it had flashed into a time warp and spent a few bars in 1901. I love this movement but I don't understand what it's doing in this concerto. It's almost desolate.

The second gives way without pause to the third, which is like the final movement of the first three concertos, fast (mostly) and exhilarating. The absence of space between the second and third must signify something, but personally I think I'd like a few moments of reflection between them. 

The Fourth Piano Concerto was written around the same time as the Fourth Symphony, and strikes me as similar in one very broad way: its relative modesty as compared to some of Beethoven's later work. The Fourth Symphony is one of my favorites, so its not surprising that I like this concerto quite a lot. Now on to the 5th, the "Emperor." I heard it a few times, long ago, and don't recall anything about it except an impression that it's *really* Beethoven-ish.