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The Warsaw Concerto is a one-piece piano concerto, written as an important ingredient of the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight . This film was later also called under the title Suicide Squadron. The concert was written by the British composer Richard Addinsell , and orchestrated by another Brit: Roy Douglas, whose contribution to the piece is rarely called.

The film has a love story as plot, and acts around the life of the fictional composer of the Concerto. This composer, a Pool, was also a pilot in the Second World War and ran a shell-shock , and fled to England. He's considering in the film return to Poland to continue to fight for his country. The actor who plays the role of composer Anton Walbrookis. He was an accomplished amateur pianist, and his hands are, therefore, will be shown in the film.

However, the soundtrack of the film was performed by the professional pianist Louis Kentner with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Muir Mathieson.Kentner initially wanted his name did not appear in the movie have mentioned, lest his interference with the genre movie would be nutritionally disadvantageous for his classical piano music career.

The film producers wanted a piano piece in the style of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini or of his second or third piano concerto, but were unable to persuade Rachmaninoff himself to write a piece or an existing composition for their film.

The theme of this concert was later used in yet another movie: The Sea Wolves (1980), in an arangement of Roy Budd.

The first performance can be placed on 26 June 1941 when the film was run in the United Kingdom. The first date of a concert performance is not known. Just after the appearance of the film also followed the firstLP, in the combination that the film music played.

Orchestration[Edit][]

The orchestration is according to ChesterNovello, the music publishing house:

Appearance in popular culture[Edit][]

  • The theme of the concert starred in a popular-music love song whose lyrics "The world outside will never know ..." by The Four Coins. [1]
  • The theme charted at number 18 on the UK SIngles chart in January 1959, under the title The World Outside by Ronnie Hilton, a pop singer in England.
  • Spike Milligan repeatedly refers to the concert in his autobiography Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall and the subsequent books: ' the bloody awful Warsaw Concerto '.
  • José Carreras took the concert on as the opening track on his 1999 album Pure Passion .
  • The Grammy Award-winner and Cuban jazz pianist/composer Gonzalo Rubalcaba took a Latin arrangement of the Warsaw Concerto in 2005.
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