Concerto

Concerto (pronounced kuhn-cher-toh or kawn-cher-taw (Italian))

(1) A composition for an orchestra and one or more principal instruments (ie soloists), usually in symphonic form. The classical concerto consisted typically of several movements, and often a cadenza.

(2) An alternative word for ripieno.

1519: From the Italian concertare (concert), the construct being con- + certō.  The Latin prefix con- is from the preposition cum (with) and certō is from certus (resolved, certain) +‎ -ō; the present infinitive certāre, the perfect active certāvī, the supine certātum.  Concerto grosso (literally “big concert”; plural concerti grossi) is the more familiar type of orchestral music of the Baroque era (circa 1600–1750), characterized by contrast between a small group of soloists (soli, concertino, principale) and the full orchestra (tutti, concerto grosso, ripieno). The titles of early concerti grossi often reflected their performance locales, as in concerto da chiesa (church concerto) and concerto da camera (chamber concerto, played at court), titles also applied to works not strictly concerti grossi.  Ultimately the concerto grosso flourished as secular court music.  Concerto is a noun; the noun plurals are concertos & concerti.

The origin of the Italian word concerto is unclear although most musicologists hold it’s meant to imply a work where disputes and fights are ultimately resolved by working together although the meaning did change over the centuries as musical traditions evolved.  Concerto was first used 1519 in Rome to refer to an ensemble of voices getting together with music although the first publication with this name for works for voices and instruments is by the Venetian composer Andrea Gabrieli (circa 1532-1585) and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli (circa 1555-1612), a collection of concerti, dated 1587. Up to the first half of the seventeenth century, the term concerti was used in Italy for vocal works accompanied by instruments, many publications appearing with this title although initially, the Italian word sinfonia (from the Latin symphōnia, from the Ancient Greek συμφωνία (sumphōnía) was also used.  It was during the Baroque era the concerto evolved into a recognizably modern form.

Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Arnold: Concerto for Group and Orchestra, 24 September 1969.

Although pop groups playing with orchestras is now not rare, there’s never been anything quite like Jon Lord’s (1941-2012) Concerto for Group and Orchestra, performed on 24 September 1969 at the Royal Albert Hall by Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006).  The work was a true concerto in three movements: Energico, Lento and Con Fuoco; an attempt to fuse the sound of an orchestra with that of a heavy metal band.  It proved a modest commercial success and in the twenty-first century there has been a revival of interest with many performances.

Cover of the original Tetragrammaton pressing of Deep Purple's second album The Book of Taliesyn (1968).

Although something very different from what most rock bands were doing in 1969, Lord's concerto really was a synthesis of some of the material two of the bands previous three albums, both of which contained threads in the tradition of the German classical music in which Lord had been trained.  Recorded during their early quasi-psychedelic period, the title of their second album had been borrowed from The Book of Taliesin (Llyfr Taliesin in the Welsh), a fourteenth century manuscript written in Middle Welsh which contains some five dozen poems, some pre-dating the tenth century while the third owed some debt to the seventeenth & eighteenth.  The Concerto for Group and Orchestra was very much in the vein of Deep Purple's early output but what was at the time unexpected was that less than a year after the performance, the band released the album In Rock, a notable change in musical direction and one decidedly not orchestral.  Prior to In Rock, Deep Purple's output had been eclectic with no discernible thematic pattern, a mix of influences from pop, blues and psychedelia, delivered with the odd classical flourish so suddenly to produce one of the defining albums of heavy metal was unexpected in a way the Concerto was not.  For the band however, it was the performance at the Royal Albert Hall which proved the anomaly, In Rock providing the template which would sustain them, through personnel changes and the odd hiatus, well into the twenty-first century.

Cover of the original Harvest pressing of Deep Purple's fourth album: Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969).

Lord wasn’t discouraged by the restrained enthusiasm of the music press, describing critics as “…an archaic, if necessary, appendage to the music business” and pursued variations of the concept for the rest of his life.  The most noted was Windows (1974), a collaboration with German conductor and composer Eberhard Schoener (b 1938) which included Continuo on B-A-C-H (B-A-C-B# in musical notation), a piece which built on the unfinished triple fugue that closed Johann Sebastian Bach's (1685–1750) Art of the Fugue, written in the last years of his life.  Although not included with the original release on vinyl, the band did perform some of their other material just before the concerto began including a song which would appear on In Rock.  That was Child in Time, a long and rather dramatic piece with some loud screaming which must have been quite unlike anything which some of that night's older critics might previously have enjoyed and perhaps it affected them.  Unlike pop music’s fusions with jazz, attempts to synthesize with classical traditions never attracted the same interest or approbation, the critical consensus seemingly that while a cobbler could create a hobnail boot for a ballerina, most found it hard to imagine why.

Jon Lord with Mercedes-Benz 300 SL (W198, 1954-1963) Gullwing (1954-1957), photographed by Fin Costello, Los Angeles, 1975.

Plenty of folk did however see why and thirty years on, on 25 & 26 September 1999 the piece was again performed live at the Royal Albert Hall as the culmination of a concert with additional material.  The original score had been lost, compelling Lord and two collaborators to recreate by listening to recordings, synchronised with the video, the process said to be "challenging" even for professional musicians, one of whom was the piece’s composer.  Released on CD and DVD, interest was stimulated worldwide and Deep Purple embarked on a tour, performing the concerto in Japan, Europe and South America, in each location teaming with local orchestras.  Between then and his death in 2012, Lord was involved with almost a dozen performances around the world including one staged in Dublin with the RTÉ Concerto Orchestra, marking the 40^th anniversary.  Now in the public domain, musicians continue to explore the Concerto for Group and Orchestra, a piece which in 1969 most critics had dismissed as little more than a curiosity.

Lindsay Lohan in two-tiered deep purple dress, MTV Movie Awards, Universal City, Los Angeles, California, May 2008.

Musicologists working in the field of classical music focus much on the intricacy of a composition’s structure and in that they’re not quite analogous with structuralists in other disciplines but there’s intricacy too in the classification of works and they worked out while all concertos include a soloist and orchestra, not all works with soloist and orchestra are concertos.  The term “concerto” requires a certain arrangement of instrumentation but the word implies also specific musical form and structure. Although many modern forms of “popular” music have been derided as “formulaic”, conventions were followed also by classical composers and concertos tended to conform to a three-movement structure (fast–slow–fast), something exploited by the disruptive modernists of the twentieth century who wrote concertos which ignored all conventions, delighting some critics while appalling others; listeners (if sales on vinyl or optical disc are a guide) preferred to stick to the classics.

In those classics, the typical pattern was a first movement in the sonata-allegro form with a double exposition (ie the orchestra presenting a theme), followed by the soloist’s contribution which might include a cadenza (an extended passage showcasing the performer’s virtuosity).  The point about the “concerto” was that while a prominent voice, the soloist’s contribution was interpolated to emphasize their interplay with the orchestra (“in dialogue” as the critics sometimes put it) and in that, while often the central figure, the soloist was a part of the texture.  The point at which a piece becomes “a concerto” was of course influenced by the label the composer attached but the form sometimes transcended the tag, Beethoven’s Ludwig van Beethoven’s (circa 1770–1827) Fantasy for piano, vocal soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra, Op. 80 (1808 and styled usually as Choral Fantasy), as the name suggests, includes solo contributions but was not called a “concerto” and Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) made much use of vocal soloists without troubling to call the compositions “concertos”.  At the margins, the definitions are fuzzy; Maurice Ravel’s (1875–1937) Tzigane (1924) was a piece for violin and orchestra (and very much a piece for a virtuosic violinist) but it’s classified as a rhapsody because the two elements don’t “interplay” as is demanded by a concerto and in the same vein, while oratorios and cantatas often include solo vocal lines, they augment the orchestral contribution rather than being “in dialogue”.

An improbable sextet: Deep Purple with Malcolm Arnold, London, 1969.  The sub-editor failed to correct the caption, Jon Lord standing second from left.  Left to right: percussionist Ian Paice (b 1948), keyboard player Jon Lord (1941-2012), conductor Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006), guitarist Richie Blackmore (b 1945), vocalist Ian Gillan (b 1945) and bassist Roger Glover (b 1945).

Until well into the twentieth century, critics and academics seemed untroubled whether structure matched label but, reflecting trends in other fields, there emerged the desire to apply clear taxonomies to what historically had been a fluid practice.  The argument was “if it sounds like a concerto it must be described as one” and in this there may have been some interest from the industry because the mass-production in the 1950s of long-playing (LP) records made viable the distribution (on sometimes as few as one or two records) of even the longer concertos which once might have demanded two dozen.  So, if the structure and function of a piece not so-named resembled that of a concerto and the soloist(s) played dominant, virtuosic roles in clear contrast to the orchestra, it made sense for publishers to seek to fit the work into familiar (and importantly, popular) categories.  Even in a case where intentions were made explicit, record labels preferred to “tidy up” the lists.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756–1791) Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in E-flat major emerged from the composer’s experiments with the “sinfonia concertante” genre (blending elements of symphony & concerto), thus the hybrid (Concertante) label.  Despite that, in some publishers’ databases, it’s filed now among the concertos reflecting an interest in things "doing what it says on the tin".