Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor

Poulenc wrote the concerto in three months in the summer of 1932 on a commission from the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, whose Paris salon had also produced Stravinsky's Renard and Satie's Socrate. He told the musicologist Paul Collaer that it was an enormous step forward and that he was entering his significant period. He and his childhood friend Jacques Février played the premiere on 5 September 1932 at the ISCM festival in Venice, with the La Scala orchestra under Désiré Defauw. The Balinese gamelan he had heard in Paris the year before left its mark on the first movement. Writing to Igor Markevitch, Poulenc listed what lay on his piano while he worked: the concertos of Mozart and of Liszt, Ravel’s, and Markevitch’s own Partita.