Dutch composer Robin de Raaff (b.1968), a Tanglewood Composition Fellow in the summer of 2000, won that year’s prestigious Jacobs Commission, the fulfillment of which resulted in the initial three movements of the Piano Concerto, which received its world premiere in the summer of 2001 at Tanglewood. It received critical acclaim from: 
-Paul Griffiths in the New York Times: “This was where the echoes of Mr. Ligeti's music came in […] But Mr. de Raaff has his own way of weaving together allusions to things as disparate as medieval music (again) and Varèse, and his own poetry.” 
-Richard Dyer in The Boston Globe: “The Piano Concerto is sophisticated in structure and workmanship, and the slow central section rises to eloquence.”

The performance tonight will be the World Premiere of the Piano Concerto in its complete form, with two added new movements that were completed last summer. 
 
Writing a piano concerto, or a concerto in general, poses a lot of questions concerning balance between the soloist and the other instruments. “I immediately chose to keep the ensemble to a minimum, to be able to emphasize and explore the more subtle character of the piano”, as done so explicitly in the slow, second movement of this concerto. The first  three movements form one arch, one bow, of which the three movements are an uninterrupted part, as do the last two seperate movements. There is a break in between the 3rd and the 4th movement, ultimately forming two larger movements with smaller inner movements.
	The idea of the piece is very much a structural one inspired by the Violin Concerto of Stravinsky. In Stravinsky’s concerto every movement starts from the same musical gesture from which rather different music evolves. In De Raaffs Piano Concerto all five movements start from the same musical situation, the interval the fifth (d1–a1) in the middle register. This opening gesture, which forms a focal point from which musical environments both derive and arrive, thus creating completely different musical worlds that are constructively different yet linked together by a common root and common material. The relation between the movements is always 1:2, creating the fast, initial movements (quarter = 100) of exactly five minutes, then the slow 2nd movements (quarter = 66) of exactly 2 1/2 minutes and then a fast movement again of exactly 5 minutes, derived from the ratio 2:1:2, creating a Fast-Slow-Fast total movement. The last two movements have the same relationships in tempo, duration (1:2) and character. 
  
	This Piano concerto is dedicated to De Raaff’s former teacher George Benjamin.

Robin de Raaff,  Amsterdam, 28th of October 2002