Sometimes a piece of music appears at just the right time and in just the right context to become an indelible part of peoples' experience and memories. So it was with Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto for piano and orchestra—a pastiche of the quintessential romantic piano concerto, composed for use in the 1941 British film Dangerous Moonlight, in which a Polish pianist finds himself caught up in the Battle of Britain. The original idea of the filmmakers (one of whom, Terence Young, would go on to direct three out of the first four James Bond films) was reportedly to use Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 18 as the musical centerpiece of the film, but that idea was ultimately dropped in favor of commissioning a new, Rachmaninov-like piece from Addinsell and orchestrator Roy Douglas. The music of the Warsaw Concerto is used in the film both as incidental music and as the subject of a performance in the film (a concert worked into the plot); it fills and surrounds each moment, its passion and nostalgia (it was modeled on Rachmaninov, after all) movingly at odds with the horrific reality of life in Britain in 1941. Not at all surprisingly, audiences embraced the Concerto, which soon appeared on record and in sheet music adaptations and arrangements.

The Warsaw Concerto is not a full concerto in the usual sense of the word; it is in one movement only and lasts under ten minutes. The opening is certainly dramatic enough; the piano enters with a gusto matched perhaps only by the Grieg Piano Concerto's opening plunge; tympani alone supports this first gasp. A deliciously syrupy second theme—a melody once famous and instantly recognized around the globe—is pure Rachmaninov (its cadence-moment is borrowed straight from the Piano Concerto No. 2), but one should not think any less of Addinsell's effort for its unabashed stylistic borrowings. The effort is supremely skillful, the music graceful, and not overly self-indulgent; it is worth noting that many similar pastiches that appeared in films and on discs over the course of the next two decades have all been basically forgotten, leaving Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto to mark the genre. It helps to remember how desperately the suffering Britons needed a warmth like Rachmaninov's, even as diffused through another composer, in 1941.

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