Grand Concert pour le Pianoforte: First Version of Piano Concerto, Op.123

This edition presents the first version of Ferdinand Ries’s earliest piano concerto, the Grand concert pour le pianoforte (1806), which has gone untouched for over two centuries. Composed upon Ries’s return to Bonn after his time as Beethoven’s piano pupil, secretary, and copyist, this ambitious and expansive concerto shows the undeniable influence of his former teacher. Following extensive revision, the concerto was eventually published as the Piano Concerto No. 6 in C Major, op. 123, but Ries’s preservation of his original autograph supports the idea that he regarded the first iteration of the concerto as not just an early draft but an important score in its own right. This edition not only facilitates comparison with the work’s later version, which illuminates stylistic shifts within the piano concerto genre in the context of a single work, but also explores Ries’s earliest foray into one of the most significant areas of his compositional output.