Sunday, August 17, 2014

Musical Musings Volume 7 - Concertos Part Two

The history of concerted music for orchestra and one or more soloists is a long one, beginning with the early Baroque period (beginning roughly in 1600) to the modern contemporary period. The repertoire for one or more soloists and orchestra is huge in sheer number and variety of works, hence the Concerto category is the first category to have a second volume devoted to it.

The solo concerto really came into being in the early 18th century with the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi who made the concerto a vehicle for a soloist on one instrument with orchestra backing. He also steered music away from counterpoint and fugue and into the more accessible style gallant.  Vivaldi’s innovations in style and content led to the result in t he early 19th century of the performer/composer, virtuoso performers that wrote music for their own use that would show off their prowess on their given instrument. Many composers first made a name for themselves as performer/composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and many, many more.
 
This 7th volume in a series of ebooks about classical music composers and their works is a collection of 50 concertos. Included are works by familiar and unfamiliar composers, as well as well-known and so not well-known compositions.  There are 37 different composers included, so this volume has the greatest variety of composers of any other of the seven current volumes.

As with the rest of the volumes in the series, there are links to performances of the works that are discussed included at the end of each article.  I invite one and all to Musical Musings, the blog where these articles first appeared.