The style of the early 18th century would soon seem antiquated, and nearly irrelevant to the modern orchestra of the mid-19th century and beyond. But none of it would have been possible without the innovations of the Baroque era.
Mozart wrote the Rondo in D Major in 1782 as an alternate finale to his Piano Concerto No. 5, which he had composed almost a decade earlier. In the intervening years, he had quit his job in Salzburg and moved to Vienna with “a kick on my arse” from the Archbishop.
Both Sergei Rachmaninoff and Niccolò Paganini were virtuosos of their eras. There the similarities seem to end.
In 1829 Frédéric Chopin was still Fryderyk—a 19-year-old Polish pianist of some acclaim. His piano concertos became passports to success in Western Europe.
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.
If you think Beethoven looms large over classical music today, imagine being a young composer in 1853—just 26 years after his death—and being declared his second coming.
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.
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.