The Piano Concerto No. 2 is the Romantic concerto refurbished and made fresh.
The piano is never the hulking force here that it can be in a Romantic concerto, but it is a fount of ideas and gestures.
The piano concertos of Mendelssohn, Field, and Hummel provide a link from the Classical concerto to the Romantic concerto.
In the Third, Prokofiev sleekly updated the Romantic concerto.
His repertory as a soloist was wide - from the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart through big Romantic concertos to new music - but he quickly came to concentrate on chamber music.
In Ms. Diemer's hands, American popular rhythms and tunes are filtered and ground fine by the Romantic concerto and its pursuit of hummable melody.
Early in his career he performed standard repertory works, including the big Romantic concertos.
In one of the Romantic concertos, these qualities might have made for a glorious performance, and to a degree they did here, too.
And Joseph Szigeti, notwithstanding his faltering technique, movingly re-recorded several of the great Romantic concertos at the end of his career.
He contributed well-made melodies, a solo piano part reminiscent of Romantic concertos and a fragrant ambiance of Debussian harmony, considered "modernistic" at the time.