The Piano Concerto dates from Arensky's final year at the St Petersburg Conservatory and shows a remarkable precociousness and effortless facility. It opens with a taut Lisztian figure from the orchestra that serves as an introductory motif and foreshadows part of the second theme. A rhetorical flourish for the soloist precedes the Chopin-influenced first theme that is later taken up with abbreviated references from the woodwind. After a brief transitional passage with prominent brass writing the piano initiates a secondary theme combining lyrical charm and nostalgia. This mood soon changes and the general character of the whole movement is now transformed as the theme assumes a bravura quality, given additional muscle with off-beat orchestral chords. This triumphant gesture leads straight into the development section where the orchestra picks out the falling fourth from the first theme against arpeggio figuration from the soloist. Another appearance of the secondary theme leads to the briefest of cadenzas before the themes are recalled in their home key.

An arch-like structure shapes the second movement, marked Andante con moto and now in 3/4. Its nostalgic and harmonically ambiguous introduction eventually resolves into the warm key of D flat major where the main cantabile theme provides the movement with its characteristic languor and poetic mood. A descending cello figure heralds a more impassioned central section, Energico, providing expressive woodwind opportunities before the piano's poetic theme returns, leaving us with a brief reminder of the opening bars for horns and strings. While this derivative movement never quite reaches toward any emotional depths nor avoids a salon element it is, nonetheless, a highly polished offering for a twenty–year–old who has yet to find his own distinctive voice. It is in the balance between soloist and orchestra that Arensky is most accomplished.

A recurring feature of Arensky's style makes an early appearance in the finale in his use of 5/4 time. This trademark characteristic drew criticism from Tchaikovsky who later was to make use of this metre famously in the second movement of his own Sixth Symphony. Arensky's sonata–form last movement (back in F minor) makes full use of the orchestra (pairs of woodwind, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings) which now comes to the foreground. It opens with a compact theme (reminiscent of the opening phrase of Grieg's Piano Concerto) the potential of which Arensky never quite realises and which eventually gives way to a more lyrical folk–like idea now in F major. Youthful inexperience limits any substantial development of these two themes and they return in their expected keys and rightful place to conclude this impressive student concerto.