The road from Warsaw

The concerto is finished in August, and in September it is tried out at home, in the Chopin family's apartment on Krakowskie Przedmieście. On 22 September the orchestra comes there, in Chopin's words, "except the trumpets and kettledrums", and "the whole good musical world" of Warsaw is invited to listen.

Chopin plays the concerto in public for the first time. His closest friend Tytus Woyciechowski, to whom he has been describing this music in letters since spring, is not among them, so the next morning Chopin writes him an account of the evening. He will not perform in his homeland again.

Chopin sets out on a concert tour he has been putting off since spring. He is seen off at Wola, then a tollgate outside the city. Three days later, in Kalisz, Tytus joins him, and they travel on together: Wrocław, Dresden, Prague, Vienna.

In Vienna the friends learn that an uprising has begun in Warsaw. Tytus returns to Poland and talks Chopin out of going with him. Chopin stays on alone and gives no concert in Vienna that winter; he plays the E minor concerto here only on 11 June 1831.

Here the news reaches Chopin that Warsaw fell on 8 September. From Stuttgart he travels to Paris.

Chopin's first concert in Paris; Friedrich Kalkbrenner, then the city's most celebrated pianist, helped to arrange it. Chopin plays one of his two concertos, and the sources do not agree which: in December he himself named the F minor, while Ferdinand Hiller, who took part in the evening, remembered the E minor. Even the day is uncertain: 25 or 26 February.

In June the concerto is printed by the Paris publisher Maurice Schlesinger, in September by the Leipzig publisher Kistner. In Paris the music with the orchestral parts costs 24 francs, the piano part alone 12. The Leipzig title page carries the line: "performed by the author at his concerts in Paris".

The last public performance of the concerto by Chopin himself that we know of. All the known performances are on the concert map.

Now the concerto is played by Chopin's pupils, and he accompanies them on a second piano. Of one of them, Karl Filtsch, Chopin says that the boy plays this concerto better than he does himself.

Chopin died on 17 October. At the funeral Mozart's Requiem is performed: a music paper of the time wrote that this was his wish. He knew the work closely and owned a small score of it. At the organ is Lefébure-Wély, the church's organist and a pupil of Kalkbrenner - the same man who, as a student, played the E minor concerto for his diploma.

Ludwika, Chopin's sister, brings his heart to Warsaw. It is kept to this day in a pillar of the Holy Cross Church. Chopin himself never returned to Poland after 2 November 1830.

On this evening the recording we listen to on the site is made (the video of the concert is on the pianist's channel). The pianist Hayato Sumino plays the concerto live with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, which has come from Katowice; Marin Alsop conducts. You can start with the first movement.

The final of the Chopin Competition: eleven pianists, each playing one of his two concertos with orchestra. This year, for the first time, one more compulsory work is added to the concerto, the Polonaise-Fantaisie. Artur Szklener, director of the Chopin Institute, explained: both concertos were written early and show only the "brilliant" style. So this music is heard once more in the city where it was written.