Bortkiewicz, Serge

Bortkiewicz, Serge – Piano Concerto in B-flat Op. 16 (Piano reduction, 2 copies)

For more information about the piece read the preface of the full score:

The life of Sergei Eduardovich Bortkiewicz was not among the most trouble-free in the lexicon of composers: a nineteenth-century romantic seeking a name for himself in the twentieth century, he was, like so many composers on the European mainland, a frequent victim of changing political circumstances. Born to landed gentry of Polish extraction in the Russian city of Kharkov (now the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv), he inherited his love for music from his mother and received music instruction from local teachers. Upon completing the Gymnasium in 1895, he left for St. Petersburg, where he studied law at the University and, at the same time, music at the Imperial Conservatory, where his teachers included Karel Pieter Hendrik van Ark (1839-1902) in piano and Anatol Lyadov (1855-1914) in theory. With one year remaining in his law studies, a student uprising resulted in the closure of the University, and Bortkiewicz entered the military, from which he was dismissed several months later on account of illness. In 1900 he began two years’ worth of study at the Leipzig Conservatory, where his teachers included the Liszt pupils Alfred Reisenauer (1863-1907) in piano and Salomon Jadassohn (1831-1902) in composition. By this time Bortkiewicz was already beginning to feel himself more a composer than a pianist, and his activity during the following eleven years in Berlin (1904-1914) increasingly resembled that of a composer who performed primarily in order to propagate his own works. The one constant in these years, and indeed throughout the rest of his life, was Lisaveta Geraklitova, a friend of his sister’s, whom he married in 1904. …

Full preface   > HERE