Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 16

National Federation of Music Clubs 2020-2024 Selection Two Pianos

By Sergei Prokofiev

This is perhaps the only reliable edition of this work available at the moment, with IMC not publishing only publishing the 1st/4th and MCA and Forbergs being increasingly hard to find. The notes themselves are all perfectly fine, Prokofiev himself wrote the reduction. The physical quality of the product...

is certainly not worth the price however. The cover is a cheap plastic which is already showing wear after only a week of use, and the edition is staple-bound. It stays open well enough on some pages, but needs some squishing to function properly. The paper quality is low, blinding white and thin. The print quality is also sub-par with just a few too many gaps in ink. All the authority and notational accuracy is here, I just wish it were encased in a nicer product. Then it would perhaps be worth the incredibly steep price.

If Brahms 2 and Rach 3 are said to be the Everest of Piano Concerti, I think Prokofiev 2 is like K2 (may not be as tall, but it has fewer summits and more technical challenges). The music deserves 100 stars; but at this price, Boosey failed my expectations. If...

it really 'has' to be this expensive, Boosey's scores should at least come wire-bound (instead of the two thin office staples that hold together this "investment" (I'm a college undergraduate student – so $45 is a lot to put down on a single piece of music). Additionally, this edition is shrunken down a bit from the Boosey two piano pdf available on IMSLP – so it comes out to ~70 pages rather than the 101 pages in the previous edition. As expected, the music itself is phenomenal and fiendishly difficult. Performed the first movement today – now I'm beginning to stare into the abyss of the Scherzo and Intermezzo movements (gulp)! It's virtuosically gut-wrenching music that'll definitely keep your hands busy for ages to come!

This is a beast of a concerto and the cadenza is incredibly difficult. It is a beautiful piece and this is a fine edition. My only complaint is that it is very overpriced.

This definitely not a piece to take lightly! Very dramatic and every movement brings it's own interpretive and technical challenges. The first movement's cadenza is quite a test of endurance, but in good hands you can ignore the technique and just listen to the beautiful structure of it...

all. Only concern about the edition is the price... lets get a reasonable one on these Prokofiev concerti, please. How else are poor music majors expected to learn them all without going broke!

this is easily the most difficult piano concerto ever written. And I've learned all the hard ones, the brahms second, the rachmaninov second and third, the prokofiev second and third, and this is easily the most difficult. Large chords with jumps, beautiful in its own respect, and virtuostic. Specifically...

the cadenza from the first movement, ten pages long and requiring four hands, you have to have both hands constantly moving