7 - The concerto

Summary

The Baroque and Classical eras

Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli's Concerti per voci e stromenti musicali … (Venice, 1587), comprising sacred music and madrigals for voices and instruments, is the earliest known publication incorporating the term ‘concerto’ in its title. ‘Concerto’ then denoted simply an aggregation of performers and was applied to various musical genres, vocal and instrumental. The instrumental concerto emerged as an independent form towards the end of the seventeenth century and soon evolved into a genre in which virtuosity and textural contrast were significant elements.

Among the earliest Italian composers to exploit the cello as a concertante instrument were Jacchini, Della Bella and Dall'Abaco. Jacchini's Concerti per camera … con Violoncello Obligato Op. 4 (Bologna, 1701) comprises ten works, six of which include brief passages for a solo cello. These passages, which appear mostly in the fast outer movements (all but No. 6 are three-movement structures), are based on scales or sequential patterns and are not technically demanding. Dall'Abaco's twelve Concerti a quattro da chiesa Op. 2 (Amsterdam, 1712) reconcile their adoption of forms from the sonata with solo passages principally for a violin. But the eleventh concerto, in G major, specifies ‘con il Violoncello obligato’, which is required to play a more extensive solo role than in Jacchini's works.

The earliest true solo concertos for cello and orchestra were composed by Vivaldi, who wrote most of his twenty-seven examples (RV398–424) for the young female cellists of the Pio Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, where he was employed irregularly from 1703 to 1740. Vivaldi was the first to develop fully the formal and stylistic possibilities of the Torellian concerto model, as demonstrated in some of Torelli’s posthumously published Concerti grossi Op. 8 (Bologna, 1709). Although few of Vivaldi’s cello concertos make exceptional technical demands, they fully realise the instrument’s warm, expressive sonorities, most adopting minor keys.