What is classical music? · Unit 4: Kinds of work
Romances, rhapsodies and fantasies
A concerto is not the only way to set a soloist against an orchestra. Composers also wrote shorter, freer , with titles that name a mood or a method rather than a fixed plan: romance, rhapsody, fantasy, variations, or simply concert piece, in German Konzertstück. Most are in a single movement.
A sings: it is slow, tender and lyrical. Beethoven wrote two for violin and orchestra around 1800, each about eight minutes long, in which a calm main tune keeps returning between contrasting episodes. More than a century later Vaughan Williams subtitled The Lark Ascending a romance: the solo violin rises and circles like the skylark of George Meredith’s poem, while a small orchestra paints the landscape below.
A moves through sharply contrasting moods, as if it were being made up on the spot. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, first played in New York in 1924 with the composer at the piano, opens with a clarinet trill and a long upward slide, and its melodies take their colour from the blues. A is just as free and often borrows existing tunes: each of the four movements of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy is built on a Scottish folk song.
Some of these works have several soloists. In the late eighteenth century a gave a group of them a work of symphonic size. Haydn wrote one in London in 1792 for violin, cello, oboe and bassoon; Mozart’s, for violin and viola, treats its two soloists as equal partners.
Other pieces began life somewhere else. The Méditation from Massenet’s opera Thaïs is an interlude for solo violin and orchestra, played between two scenes of the drama, and it has long had a concert life of its own.
Listen to these works much as you would to a concerto: the soloist leads, the orchestra frames and answers, and a may let the soloist play alone. Without a concerto’s three-movement frame, the title is your best guide to the plan: a romance will sing, a rhapsody will change mood, and a set of variations will keep coming back to its theme.