On the cusp of its 100th anniversary, the prestigious music publisher G. Schirmer looked to commission a new work for the occasion. It reached out to the most famous name on its roster, Samuel Barber, and he agreed to write a piano concerto in honor of the centenary. The premiere was set for the second night of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ opening-week festivities with soloist John Browning and Erich Leinsdorf leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra. No pressure.

What the audience witnessed on the night of September 24, 1962, was “the birth of an American classic,” reported the New York World-Telegram and The Sun the following day. Tonight, Yuja Wang and the Los Angeles Philharmonic perform the last two movements of the work.

The second movement, Canzone, seems to “emerge from nowhere,” the composer wrote. Yet its origins lie in the 1959 Canzone for Flute and Piano (originally titled Elegy and later published as Opus 38a). The short piece was written for the amateur flute player—and Barber’s companion at the time—Manfred Ibel, to whom the Piano Concerto is dedicated. Barber biographer Barbara B. Heyman characterizes the movement as “a wordless lied, tenderly and mournfully romantic.”

From there the finale sprints into a driving 5/8 rhythm that “plunges headlong into an ostinato bass figure for piano, over which several themes are tossed,” Barber wrote. Browning found similarities to Debussy’s Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses, which he had played for the composer. At points in writing the third movement, Barber called in the help of Vladimir Horowitz, who had premiered his Piano Sonata. Horowitz agreed with Browning that certain passages were unplayable at Barber’s tempos, and the composer revised them accordingly. The results were an overwhelming success. The concerto would win Barber his second Pulitzer Prize for Music and mark a high point in his career.

—Amanda Angel