One work may be signalized as marking a keen instinct for pianistic effects, as really pointing to some such treatment of the keyboard as Chopin, by reason of his immortal fancy, made unsurpassable, perfect. This is the concerto in A minor. Here, as we should expect, he indulged himself in weaving elaborate show-figures over an orchestral groundwork of little or no musical value. But the show-figures are often brilliantly effective. For example, after the piano has played the second theme in the first movement, there follows a long quasi-solo passage of mixed double and single notes, which, trivial as it may be as music, gives what one might call a lot of jolly good fun. Notice the wide spacing here and there, the frequent expeditions into the highest registers, the marches from bottom to top and the oily trickling back to middle again. Then in the development section there is good fun too; and there is a coda which demands the wrist of a virtuoso such as Chopin or Liszt, instantaneous skips of the arm, runs for both hands in thirds, all remarkably fluent and all sprung right from the nature if not the soul of the instrument. The adagio is, of course, flaccid worthlessness; but the final rondo has no little musical charm, and, as far as treatment of the pianoforte goes, is not at all unworthy of Liszt. The triplet rhythm is in itself brilliantly maintained; there are series of fourths and sixths, triplet figures very widely spaced, and again single and double notes mixed in the same group, runs in thirds, chromatic thirds, double trills, a profusion, in fact, of most of the virtuoso’s stock in trade, all gracefully and brilliantly displayed. It will be noticed that the best of it is sheer figure work, without pianoforte accompaniment, or lightly supported by the orchestra. And this may point to one of the marks of its mediocrity as a whole, one of the reasons why it sounds, after all, laughably old-fashioned in many measures. This is no other than the lack of variety, of skill, and of taste in accompaniment figures. In one of the unquestionably effective passages already referred to--the first solo passages for the piano in the first movement, after the second theme--the right-hand work is modern; but the left hand has only the vapid, commonplace tum-tum scheme of single note and chord. Not only is this formula repeated flatly, without attempt at variety, in blissful ignorance of its unworthiness; even the very notes are repeated as far as it is possible to go without changing the harmony.