Chopin’s beautiful concerto movement, arranged for 2 people at 1 piano!

by Scott

We first played a piano 4-hand arrangement of this piece (the Larghetto slow movement from the Piano Concerto no. 2 by Chopin) near the start of the Covid pandemic, during our weekly live-streamed recital series. Every week, we had a new themed program, and one of these themes was Chopin. The duet arrangement that we played back then was found on imslp.org, but the arranger’s name was not printed. I decided to write my own duet arrangement since there were some passages that I wanted to write differently. Some examples of changes I made: putting the string parts in the secondo and the wind parts in the primo at the beginning, adding a few missing orchestral lines, dividing parts of the melody between the two hands, so that the left hand has something to do (otherwise, it ends up being 3-hands instead of 4!), putting the left hand accompaniment of the fast right hand passages in the primo, so that there could be more freedom in the timing.

We performed this in a private live concert at the beautiful senior home Crofton Manor in Vancouver. We dedicated this performance to one of our supporters, Martha Lou Henley, who told us this is one of her favorite pieces of music. We were happy that she was in the audience at this performance, as it’s always special when a performer can speak directly to a listener through their music.

The primo part of the imslp.org version had only the fast notes, while the secondo part had to accompany and coordinate with the primo.

My arrangement put both the fast notes and the accompanying 8th notes in the primo part, so there were no coordination issues!