Erik Chisholm : Concertos pour piano n°1 et n°2

Piano International (May, 2012)
Like Bartók in Hungary, the Scottish composer Erik Chisholm (1904-65) aimed to tap into folk sources to enrich Scotland’s art music. Perhaps the largest solo work in which he worked out these ideas was the piano sonata ‘An Riobhan Dearg’ (1939), which has been recorded by Murray McLachlan (Divine Art).

In his two piano concertos, Chisholm was working on an altogether larger scale. No 1 is inspired by pìobaireachd, the classical music of the Scots bagpipe, and No 2 by Indian music – in 1945 he was named director of ENSA in India and found that the music of that country ‘gripped me from the first moment’.

The Bartókian First Concerto …