Concerto

In the second half of the 20th century and onwards into the 21st a great many composers have continued to write concertos, including Alfred Schnittke, György Ligeti, Dimitri Shostakovich, Philip Glass and James MacMillan among many others.

Concertos from previous ages have remained a conspicuous part of the repertoire for concert performances and recordings.

The Italian word concerto, meaning accord or gathering, derives from the Latin verb concertare, which indicates a competition or battle.

[3] Compositions were for the first time indicated as concertos in the title of a music print when the Concerti by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli [scores] were published in 1587.

[9] Later, the concerto approached its modern form, in which the concertino usually reduces to a single solo instrument playing with (or against) an orchestra.

It is conventional to state that the first movements of concertos from the Classical period onwards follow the structure of sonata form.

By the time he was twenty, Mozart was able to write concerto ritornelli that gave the orchestra admirable opportunity for asserting its character in an exposition with some five or six sharply contrasted themes, before the soloist enters to elaborate on the material.

Haydn also wrote a concerto for double bass but has since been lost to history in the great fire of Esterhaza in 1779.

During the Romantic era the cello became increasingly used as a concerto instrument; though the violin and piano remained the most frequently used.

Many of the concertos written in the early 20th century belong more to the late Romantic school, hence modernistic movement.

However, in the first decades of the 20th century, several composers such as Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Bartók started experimenting with ideas that were to have far-reaching consequences for the way music is written and, in some cases, performed.

Some of these innovations include a more frequent use of modality, the exploration of non-western scales, the development of atonality and neotonality, the wider acceptance of dissonances, the invention of the twelve-tone technique of composition and the use of polyrhythms and complex time signatures.

Beside more or less radical effects on musical language, they led to a redefinition of the concept of virtuosity that included new and extended instrumental techniques and a focus on previously neglected aspects of sound such as pitch, timbre and dynamics.

The 20th century also witnessed a growth of the concertante repertoire of instruments, some of which had seldom or never been used in this capacity, and even a concerto for wordless coloratura soprano by Reinhold Glière.

Among the works of the prolific composer Alan Hovhaness may be noted Prayer of St. Gregory for trumpet and strings, though it is not a concerto in the usual sense of the term.

In addition, the 20th century gave rise to several composers who experimented further by showcasing a variety of nontraditional orchestral instruments within the center of the orthodox concerto form.

This approach was adopted by Bela Bartok in his Concerto for Orchestra as well by other composers of the period including: Walter Piston (1933), Zoltan Kodaly (1939), Michael Tippet (1962) and Elliott Carter (1969).

From the Romantic era works for multiple instrumental soloists and orchestra were again commonly called concerto.