Selim Palmgren
Selim Palmgren (1878-1951) was born in Pori, on the western coast of Finland. Music was an important part of the everyday life of the Palmgren family. Selim made music with his siblings and also started composing as a child. Palmgren was from a relatively prosperous family of merchants and that allowed him to go to study music. He enrolled at the Helsinki Conservatory in 1895 to study piano and composition and continued his studies in Berlin in 1899 under the tuition of Ferruccio Busoni among others.
After returning to Finland, he began his professional career as a composer. In addition, he conducted several choirs and orchestras and performed as a pianist in Finland and elsewhere in the Nordic countries.
A concert trip to the United States in 1921 with his wife, soprano Maikki Järnefelt-Palmgren, lasted until 1926 when Palmgren was appointed as a professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York State.
Upon returning to Finland again, Palmgren first worked at the Helsinki Conservatory as a professor of piano and, from 1939, as a professor of composition at the same educational institution that had by then changed its name to the Sibelius Academy.
Palmgren was especially significant as a piano composer, for example, his body of work includes five piano concertos and more than three hundred piano pieces.
During his lifetime Palmgren was, after Sibelius, the most famous Finnish composer internationally. Even to the extent that his contemporaries called him “Chopin of the North” and “Crown Prince of Sibelius”.
Piano concerto No.2
“The River”
Palmgren wrote his second piano concerto, Op. 33 between 1907 and 1912. The concerto is inspired by the Kokemäenjoki River, along which Palmgren boated during his boyhood. Virta is a one-movement rhapsodic concerto that combines a late-romantic, Rachmaninoff-influenced compositional style with a virtuoso piano texture.
Folk music was one of Palmgren's interests. The main theme of the Virta concerto is based on the Swedish folk tune Näckens Polska. (Neck´s Polska. Neck being a shape shifting water spirit in Nordic and Germanic mythology).
The River concerto is probably the most popular and most played of Finnish piano concertos. In its day, its success was triumphant; in the fall of 1913, the concerto was played in Helsinki, Stockholm and Berlin and received an ecstatic reception. For example, in his diary, Sibelius mentions that he was at the Helsinki performance and that he found the concerto ingenious.
The concerto got a major advocate when top pianist of the time and Palmgren’s friend, Ignaz Friedman took it into his repertoire. In the following years, the concerto ended up with performances by major symphony orchestras such as the Berlin and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, sometimes with the composer as the soloist.