The likes of Johannes Brahms, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Felix Mendelssohn, Antonin Dvorak, and Jean Sibelius each completed one piece in the genre (an early, simple concerto for violin and strings by Mendelssohn excluded), and their compositions today are known simply as “The Brahms,” “The Tchaikovsky,” etc. The concerto now stretched to some forty minutes or more. Such is the monumental nature of Beethoven’s work that it stands alone in this genre among his oeuvre he seemed to think that it could not be rivaled by another attempt.īeethoven’s example was followed by the composers of the Romantic Period, who saw the violin concerto as conducive not only to pyrotechnic displays of skill by the soloist but also as ripe for the expression of personal testimonies of great emotion. It was Beethoven who transformed the violin concerto in the first years of the nineteenth century-as he did the symphony-into a grand orchestral work, a profound and elongated statement that plumbed emotional depths left untouched by his predecessors. The masters of the classical period, Franz Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, also composed in the form, the genre remaining throughout the Classical Period a pleasing diversion for concertgoers and party-goers, with concertos running about twenty to twenty-five minutes in length and being somewhat lighthearted in character. Two of the masters of that era-Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi-gave us supreme examples of this form the former’s solo concertos, BWV 10, and double concerto, BWV 1043, boast more than 150 available recordings each, and the latter’s Four Seasons, a series of four concertos, ranks as one of the most popular classical pieces of all time. The genre was first developed during the Baroque era, when the concerto was conceived as a tripartite structure, running about fifteen minutes in length. The violin concerto as a form of music has endured for some 300 years and remains, alongside the piano concerto, the most popular type of concerto played in modern concert halls and committed to recording.

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