Antonio Vivaldi: Winter from The Four Seasons
You can hear the icy snow and the “harsh breath of a horrid wind.” Rarely if ever before had instrumental music so vividly depicted real-life scenes.
Category: Violin Concerto
Leonard Bernstein: Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium)
Long before a symposium was a dry, academic conference, it was an after-dinner party with a lot of wine. Plato’s Symposium, written around 360 BCE, imagines such a party, and it became the framework for Bernstein’s multi-movement work for solo violin and an orchestra of strings and percussion.
Joseph Bologne: Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 5
This violin concerto was likely premiered by Bologne with the Concert des Amateurs, and was published around 1775 by Antoine Bailleux. Look out for the sudden entry of peasant pipes and fiddles, crashing the elegant ambiance—a musical anticipation of the French Revolution to come.
Benjamin Britten: Violin Concerto, Op. 15
Britten was motivated by pacifism in the face of war in Europe. His violin concerto is uneasy, with lyrical lines built on a dangerously unstable foundation.