Concerto
20th and 21st century

Many of the concertos written in the early 20th century belong more to the late Romantic school, hence modernistic movement. Masterpieces were written by Edward Elgar (a violin concerto and a cello concerto), Sergei Rachmaninoff and Nikolai Medtner (four and three piano concertos, respectively), Jean Sibelius (a violin concerto), Frederick Delius (a violin concerto, a cello concerto, a piano concerto and a double concerto for violin and cello), Karol Szymanowski (two violin concertos and a "Symphonie Concertante" for piano), and Richard Strauss (two horn concertos, a violin concerto, Don Quixote —a tone poem that features the cello as a soloist—and among later works, an oboe concerto).

However, in the first decades of the 20th century, several composers such as Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Bartók started experimenting with ideas that were to have far-reaching consequences for the way music is written and, in some cases, performed. Some of these innovations include a more frequent use of modality, the exploration of non-western scales, the development of atonality and neotonality, the wider acceptance of dissonances, the invention of the twelve-tone technique of composition and the use of polyrhythms and complex time signatures.

These changes also affected the concerto as a musical form. Beside more or less radical effects on musical language, they led to a redefinition of the concept of virtuosity that included new and extended instrumental techniques and a focus on previously neglected aspects of sound such as pitch, timbre and dynamics. In some cases, they also brought about a new approach to the role of soloists and their relation to the orchestra.

Two great innovators of early 20th-century music, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, both wrote violin concertos. The material in Schoenberg's concerto, like that in Berg's, is linked by the twelve-tone serial method. In the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, the cello enjoyed an unprecedented popularity. As a result, its concertante repertoire caught up with those of the piano and the violin both in terms of quantity and quality.

The 20th century also witnessed a growth of the concertante repertoire of instruments, some of which had seldom or never been used in this capacity, and even a concerto for wordless coloratura soprano by Reinhold Glière. As a result, almost all classical instruments now have a concertante repertoire. Among the works of the prolific composer Alan Hovhaness may be noted Prayer of St. Gregory for trumpet and strings, though it is not a concerto in the usual sense of the term. In the later 20th century the concerto tradition was continued by composers such as Maxwell Davies, whose series of Strathclyde Concertos exploit some of the instruments less familiar as soloists.

In addition, the 20th century gave rise to several composers who experimented further by showcasing a variety of nontraditional orchestral instruments within the center of the orthodox concerto form. Included within this group are: Paul Hindemith (Concerto for Trautonium and String Orchestra in 1931), Andre Jolivet (Concerto of Ondes Martenot in 1947), Heitor Villa-Lobos (Concerto for Harmonica in 1956), John Serry Sr. (Concerto in C Major for Bassetti Accordion in 1966), Astor Piazzolla (Concerto for Bandoneon, String Orchestra and Percussion, "Aconcagua" in 1979), Peter Maxwell Davies (Concerto for Piccolo and Orchestra, Op. 182 in 1996), and Tan Dun (Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra in 1998)

Other composers of this era adopted a neoclassical rejection of specific features which typically characterized the concerto form during the Baroque or Romantic periods. Several of them achieved this objective by incorporating various musical elements from the realm of jazz within the structure of the concerto. Included in this group were: Aaron Copland (Concerto for Piano, 1926), Maurice Ravel (Concerto for the Left Hand, 1929), Igor Stravinsky (Ebony Concerto for clarinet and jazz band, 1945) and George Gershwin (Concerto in F, 1925). Still others called upon the orchestra itself to function as the primary virtuosic force within the concerto form. This approach was adopted by Bela Bartok in his Concerto for Orchestra as well by other composers of the period including: Walter Piston (1933), Zoltan Kodaly (1939), Michael Tippet (1962) and Elliott Carter (1969).

Concertos with concert band include:
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