of his other works. Technical difficulties include dense musical textures, complex and light finger work, massive leaps of left hand chords, trills and scales in double notes and difficult octaves. For this reason it is considered one of Chopin's most difficult pieces, but regardless of this challenge, some pianists and critics find it unconvincing. It has received relatively little attention in the concert hall or in recordings, and it is not particularly well known to music lovers. Those who have recorded it include Claudio Arrau, Nikolai Demidenko, Garrick Ohlsson, Nikita Magaloff, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Roger Woodward. However, Chopin himself seems to have been very proud of it. He told Aleksander Hoffmann: "This is the very first piece I shall play in my first concert upon returning home to a free Warsaw". Chopin never returned to Warsaw, and it is perhaps for this reason that there is no record of him ever playing it in public. In fact, there seems to be no record of its first public performance at all. (Claude Debussy played it at the Paris Conservatoire in July 1879.) The work received one of its rare public performances at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the early 1980s as the opening work for a 'quasi orchestral' solo piano recital by British pianist Mark Latimer that ended with only the second London performance of the equally demanding Concerto for Solo Piano by Charles-Valentin Alkan. Transcriptions Some attempts have been made to score the Allegro de concert for piano and orchestra as probably originally intended by Chopin. Jean Louis Nicodé produced two versions—one for two pianos, and a later one for piano and orchestra—but he added various parts of his own creation, amounting to 70 bars of new music (a development section after bar 205, a third tutti, etc.). He also "beefs up" the piano part towards the end. This version was first played by the Dutch pianist Marie Geselschap in New York City, with an orchestra conducted by Anton Seidl. In the early 1930s, Kazimierz Wiłkomirski made another orchestration that was faithful to Chopin's published score. The world premiere recording of this version was by Michael Ponti with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Volker Schmidt-Gertenbach. The Australian pianist Alan Kogosowski went further. In addition to restructuring and augmenting Chopin's music for the Allegro de concert into a new treatment for piano and orchestra, he also created settings for piano and