What is concerto

Send us feedback. See more words from the same year. Accessed 11 Nov. More Definitions for concerto. See the full definition for concerto in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Nglish: Translation of concerto for Spanish Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Definition of concerto. Examples of concerto in a Sentence Recent Examples on the Web Often this concerto is approached with a more matter-of-fact presentation, but not Gavrylyuk.

The earliest known solo concertos are nos. These works employ both a three-movement cycle and clear if diminutive ritornello form, like that of the ripieno concerto except that sections for the soloist and continuo separate the orchestral ritornellos.

Active in Bologna, Torelli would have known of the operatic arias and the numerous sonatas and sinfonias for trumpet and strings produced in Bologna since the s. He himself composed more than a dozen such works for trumpet, two dated in the early s.

The most influential and prolific composer of concertos during the Baroque period was the Venetian Antonio Vivaldi — In addition to his nearly 60 extant ripieno concertos, Vivaldi composed approximately concertos for one or more soloists, including about solo concertos two-thirds for solo violin and 45 double concertos over half for two violins. The virtuosity of the solo sections increases markedly, especially in the later works, and concurrently the texture becomes more homophonic.

Concertos for instruments other than violin began to appear early in the 18th century, including the oboe concertos of George Frideric Handel and the numerous concertos for flute, oboe, bassoon, cello, and other instruments by Vivaldi. The earliest organ concertos can probably be credited to Handel 16 concertos, c. In the latter case, all but probably one of the concertos are arrangements of existing works, though Bach had already approached the idea of a harpsichord concerto before in the Brandenburg Concerto no.

Skip to main content. Search for:. Concerto There are two kinds of concerto that were composed in the Baroque period: concerto grosso and solo concerto. Introduction The concerto grosso Italian for big concert o , plural concerti grossi is a form of baroque music in which the musical material is passed between a small group of soloists the concertino and full orchestra the ripieno or concerto grosso.

Introduction A solo concerto is a concerto in which a single soloist is accompanied by an orchestra. Baroque The earliest known solo concertos are nos. Are you beginning to understand a little more about it, and learning not to be scared of it? Most of my young friends that I talk to say yes; that they are feeling closer to music--sort of friendly to it; they have begun to feel that music isn't such a hard, strange business, after all, too grownup or complicated or sissy-ish or whatever.

One thing they all do worry about--and that's the words about music: hard words like recapitulation, fugue, rondo, Andantino, sinfonietta, G minor, the inversion of the second theme backwards in the augmented fifth -- doubletalk like that.

Well, I've tried not to use those words whenever I could do without them; and when I have to say them, I have tried to explain them as clearly as I could. But there are some musical words which can't be explained in a second; it takes time to learn about them; and what's more, it takes listening to the actual music they describe before you really know what they mean. One of those hard words that bothers people is the Italian word Concerto, which you really should know about.

It's really a very simple word, which in Italian means a concert: Concerto--concert [Eng. They're all practically the same word. But in music the word has come to mean a lot of other things; and that's what we're trying to find out about today.

The original meaning of the word "concert" is the idea of things happening together: a football team performs in concert; the players make a concerted effort to win the game. As a certain magazine would say, it means "togetherness," which is a lovely idea but rather an ugly word. Well, in music the word "concert" means the "togetherness" of musicians, who come together to play or to sing in a group. So ever since music began to be written for audiences like yourselves, composers have used the word Concerto to name their pieces.

All kinds of different musical forms used to be called concertos, even though they weren't pieces that we would call concertos today. You see, names can be used very loosely.

For instance, all sorts of different pieces used to be called symphonies, too, or sonatas. Those were just general words to describe the same pieces the word Concerto described: symphony, for instance, also meant musical sounds being made together; and sonata meant simply anything that sounded, nothing more.

But slowly, as the years passed, the names began to be used more strictly. Sonata began to mean a piece for any solo instrument, like this harpsichord here; or for a violin, or a flute or a lute, or a cello, or a kazoo. Now our job of word-hunting becomes easier. Do you know what a trio is? Simply a sonata for three instruments, that's all. Then there's quartet, which is a sonata for four instruments--any four instruments; so a quintet is a sonata for--how many instruments?

Right: five. And an octet is a sonata for how many instruments? Right: eight. Now, this is important: a sonata for a whole orchestra is called a symphony; isn't that simple? And a symphony that features a soloist, or a little group of soloists, separate from the big orchestra group, is called a concerto. And there you have it. That wasn't so hard, was it? Now that we know that much, we have to find out the rest by just listening to different kinds of concertos; so the rest of this program is going to be mostly just playing music.

We're going to go way back to the early classical days of Bach and Handel that we talked about a couple of programs ago, those days when the word concerto was still used pretty loosely, and could mean almost anything. There was a thing back then called a concerto grosso, which means in Italian a big concerto; and that simply meant a piece, it was usually in three movements, that was written for a big orchestra with a little orchestra attached to it, just like the earth which travels around through space with its little moon traveling next to it.

Now it's fine for all those people to be playing together: but if you'll think about it for a second, you'll realize that they can't be playing together all the time; because that would become boring: there wouldn't be any relief from a sound that was always the same. So that's why composers invented the idea of the small group, which is called the concertino, alongside the big group; and they simply took turns playing with the themes--first the big group, and then the small one, and then only part of the small one, and then the big group again, and then both groups together.

That makes variety, change, contrast, which keeps you interested. Besides, it gives the musicians in the small group a chance to show off a little by themselves. We're going to play you an example of this kind of concerto by the great Italian composer, Vivaldi, who wrote hundreds of concertos for many different kinds of instruments.

See Vivaldi was one of those marvelous composers who never seemed to run out of ideas and never seemed to run out of instruments to write them for. He spent about thirty years of his life as director of music in a girls' school, where he had a fine all-female chorus, and a strange all-female orchestra made up of whatever instruments the girls happened to be able to play.

Of course, this made him write concertos with some very peculiar little groups in them. We're going to play you one--it's one of my favorites, for an orchestra that features in its concertino two mandolins -- imagine that.