What makes a concerto

The concerto is often a large scale affair. They are popular with audiences as they usually involve a famous soloist. A concerto is a large scale work. The average length is 30minutes, however many of the great composers wrote concertos well over an hour long. As a concerto is a large scale iconic piece of classical music most of the famous composers you will have heard of had many in their repertoire. Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky wrote many notable concertos for violin and piano, while Elgar and Dvorak are known for their cello concertos.

One of the best known concertos is actually a group of four violin concertos by Vivaldi — Four Seasons. Piano concerto No. These movements would have similar tones and repeating themes but would often differ in pace or flow of the music.

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He also wrote a Triple Concerto for piano, violin, cello, and orchestra. Chopin wrote two piano concertos in which the orchestra is very much relegated to an accompanying role. Schumann, despite being a pianist-composer, wrote a piano concerto in which virtuosity is never allowed to eclipse the essential lyrical quality of the work.

In fact, argument in the traditional developmental sense is replaced by a kind of variation technique in which soloist and orchestra interweave their ideas. His concertos No. Like his violin concerto, it is symphonic in proportions. Fewer piano concertos were written in the late Romantic Period. But Grieg-inspired Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote 4 piano concertos between and His 2nd and3rd, being the most popular of the 4, went on to become among the most famous in piano repertoire.

Liszt wrote the Totentanz for piano and orchestra, a paraphrase of the Dies Irae. Many of the concertos written in the early 20th century belong more to the late Romantic school than to any modernistic movement. Some of these innovations include a more frequent use of modality, the exploration of non-western scales, the development of atonality, the wider acceptance of dissonances, the invention of the twelve-tone technique of composition and the use of polyrhythms and complex time signatures.

These changes also affected the concerto as a musical form. Beside more or less radical effects on musical language, they led to a redefinition of the concept of virtuosity in order to include new and extended instrumental techniques as well as a focus on aspects of sound that had been neglected or even ignored before such as pitch, timbreand dynamics.

In some cases, they also brought about a new approach to the role of the soloist and its relation to the orchestra. Two great innovators of early 20th-century music, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, both wrote violin concertos. Russian composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich both wrote two concertos while Khachaturian wrote a concerto and a Concerto-Rhapsody for the instrument.

In the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, the cello enjoyed an unprecedented popularity. As a result, its concertante repertoire caught up with those of the piano and the violin both in terms of quantity and quality. An important factor in this phenomenon was the rise of virtuoso cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

His outstanding technique and passionate playing prompted dozens of composers to write pieces for him, first in his native Soviet Union and then abroad. Sergei Prokofiev, another Russian composer, wrote no less than five piano concertos which he himself performed. Dmitri Shostakovich composed two. The soloist is given free rein to really show what they can do — some were composed, but others are left to the performer to realise.

Michael specialises in film and television music and was the Editor of Music from the Movies. He was previously a freelance film music journalist and spent 15 years at St George's Bristol.