The Concerto Challenge

John Adams and Thomas Adès offer new takes on a beloved form.

- Alex Ross

Glamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential feature of modern concert life. Few symphony orchestras venture far into a season without summoning a soloist to execute the majestic opening arpeggios of Beethoven’s “Emperor,” the throat-clearing double-stops of the Dvorak Cello Concerto, or some other familiar bold gesture. Orchestral economics would presumably collapse without a supply of celebrity soloists playing celebrity works. The disreputability of the genre has to do with its slightly seedy showmanship, its carnival trappings. The virtuoso violinist is a devilish hypnotist, descended from Paganini. The pianist is a Lisztian magician, conjuring wonders from a long black box.

Contemporary composers who produce concertos—there is a steady demand for them, always threatening to become a glut—must contend with the genre’s history of hoary theatrics. In the disillusioned twentieth century, the standard Romantic narrative of heroic struggle fell from fashion. The soloist more often acted the part of a solitary wanderer, traversing the damaged landscapes of modernity. Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, composed in 1935, follows a trajectory of crisis, lamentation, and dissolution. In Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto, written three decades later, the soloist is all but trampled underfoot by a rampaging orchestra.