Thursday 28 October 2021

Composers's single Violin Concertos

It is a strange phenomenon that most famous composers wrote only one violin concerto. The list starts from Beethoven (though he wrote a triple concerto featuring the violin also), Brahms (though he wrote a double concerto featuring the cello also), Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Elgar & most famously Bruch, whose only remembered piece is the violin concerto, albeit a magnificent one. But it is to be remembered that all these single violin concertos are the staples of the concert stage, & the showpieces of the virtuosos.

But the glorious exception is the most supremely gifted Mozart, who though a virtuoso Pianist, was also a violinist & composed no less than five violin concertos, the last being the famous "Turkish" so called because of the unison chromatic crescendos among other things.

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