13 - The concerto in the age of recording

Summary

Some indication of the best-loved concertos and those most frequently performed in the concert hall in the earlier part of the twentieth century is given by Tovey in the works he selected for his famous Essays in Musical Analysis which appeared in the 1930s. These were originally written as programme notes for concerts given by the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh that he founded in 1917. Tovey included a handful of concertos by Bach including the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor and the third and fourth Brandenburg Concertos, and by Handel just the Organ Concerto, Op. 7, No. 1. He selected thirteen works by Mozart including five piano concertos. There is the Cello Concerto in D major by Haydn. There are all the Beethoven concertos except the Piano Concerto in B flat, Op. 19, and all Brahms's works in the genre. There is Chopin's Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 21, Schumann's three concertos – the Violin Concerto hadn't yet been discovered – and Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Op. 64. There are works by Saint-Saëns and Max Bruch and Glazunov. The twentieth-century works include Stanford's Clarinet Concerto, Elgar's Cello Concerto, Delius's Violin Concerto, and Sibelius's Violin Concerto. Tovey thinks that the number of ‘great works in the true concerto form is surprisingly small; far smaller than the number of true symphonies’. And yet you search in vain the early record catalogues, the pre-First World War listings, to find recordings of these comparatively few canonical masterpieces.