Piano Concerto in F minor, op. 2

Arensky wrote the Piano Concerto in F minor in 1882, while still a student of Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg Conservatory, and it was published as his opus 2. He was twenty-one. The finale is written in 5/4, a metre Tchaikovsky was using in the same years and one Arensky returned to elsewhere; the concerto as a whole leans on Chopin and on Tchaikovsky rather than on the nationalist circle his teacher belonged to. Arensky moved to Moscow immediately afterwards to teach harmony, where Rachmaninov and Scriabin were among his pupils.