Piano Concerto in D minor, Wq 23, H 427

Wq 23 was written in Berlin in 1748, a year after the D minor flute concerto and while its composer was still in Frederick the Great's service. It is the most performed of his roughly fifty keyboard concertos and the one that carried his reputation as a concerto composer beyond Prussia: copies circulated widely in manuscript, and the piece survived into the era when the fortepiano replaced the harpsichord. The unison opening and the abrupt changes of mood belong to the empfindsamer Stil that Haydn and Beethoven later acknowledged as a source.