The concerto is a composition for one or more soloists and orchestra. The first concertos date from the late seventeenth century, and new ones are still being written every year. The genre appeals to one of the most basic impulses of performers and listeners: it gives a talented soloist the chance to strut his or her stuff. (read more)

The concerto is a composition for one or more soloists and orchestra. The first concertos date from the late seventeenth century, and new ones are still being written every year. The genre appeals to one of the most basic impulses of performers and listeners: it gives a talented soloist the chance to strut his or her stuff. Yet it also seems to carry deeper meanings: especially in the hands of Romantic composers, the concerto embodied the relationship between individual and crowd. Several beloved concertos originated in the late Baroque era. The four Vivaldi violin concertos entitled the Four Seasons (1725) used the interplay between soloist and orchestra to create dazzlingly evocative images of winter, spring, summer, and fall. Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos (ca. 1720) represent the concerto grosso, a type of concerto with a group of soloists and a varied texture. Mozart, whose surface gracefulness often masked fundamentally dramatic ideas, was the premier Classical-era concerto composer. His 27 piano concertos spanned his entire career and beautifully blend keyboard fireworks with complex interweaving of solo and orchestral material. Mozart wrote concertos for many other instruments as well. But it was Beethoven whose concertos really set the tone for the genre in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's five piano concertos and single violin concerto redefined the relationship between soloist and orchestra, differentiating them sharply and giving the solo part a flavor of personal expression. The nineteenth century was the heyday of the touring virtuoso, and Romantic concerto composers were happy to push soloists to their technical limits. Liszt, a piano star, wrote three piano concertos and a host of other piano-and-orchestra works for his own use, and Brahms dedicated his dense violin concerto to the internationally known performer Joseph Joachim. Other popular concertos of the nineteenth century are Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and Piano Concerto No. 1, Brahms' two piano concertos, and Dvorák's Cello Concerto in B minor. Even though it was a genre closely associated with traditional repertory, the concerto proved highly adaptable to the concerns of the twentieth century (and beyond). Virtuosi continued to use the concerto to display their powers, from Rachmaninov to the young violinist Hilary Hahn, who in the late 1990s commissioned a violin concerto from crossover composer Edgar Meyer. In the hands of Russia's Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote pairs of violin, cello, and piano concertos, the relationship between soloist and orchestra took on overtones of the life of the free-thinking individual under Communism. Hungary's Bela Bartók, in such works as the Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, used the concerto to set off his experiments with the complex rhythms of Eastern European folk music, while Alban Berg's Violin Concerto showed how the lyricism inherent in the concerto could shine through music written according to the abstract 12-tone method. Even the massed sounds and intricate layers in the music of György Ligeti fit nicely into the composer's Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, and Cello Concerto. Concertos, it seemed, would be written as long as the idea of the one against the many remained relevant.(collapse)