Concerto Grosso Guide: Modern vs. Baroque Concerto Grosso

Concerto grosso is a style of music composition for an orchestra and featured soloists. The term “concerto grosso” (plural concerti grossi) is Italian for "large concerto." This composition format enjoyed great popularity during the Baroque era of music.

While a traditional music concerto highlights a featured soloist accompanied by an orchestra, a concerto grosso passes key melodic content among a small group of soloists who play different instruments. The soloists are alternately called the concertino, the principale, or the soli. The accompanying orchestra is called the tutti or ripieno.

Most classical music concertos are solo concertos. They showcase virtuosic players on solo piano, solo violin, solo clarinet, or other such instruments. These soloists are backed up by a chamber orchestra or full orchestra. The concerto grosso appears more rarely. It gained great favor among Baroque composers, but in the ensuing centuries, it has been overtaken in popularity by the solo concerto.

The concerto grosso enjoyed peak popularity during the Baroque music period between roughly 1580 and 1750. It fell from favor during the Classical and Romantic eras before reviving in the twentieth century. The Baroque concerto grosso differs from more contemporary versions in key ways.

• Baroque concerto grosso: Baroque period composers like Arcangelo Corelli, George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Francesco Geminiani, and Giuseppe Torelli embraced concerti grossi. The Baroque-era concertino (solo instruments) typically included two violins, a basso continuo instrument (typically a cello), and a harpsichord. This is the same instrumentation found in a trio sonata. Sometimes wind instruments joined as well. The tutti (accompaniment) was usually a string orchestra with occasional brass and woodwinds. The typical Baroque concerto grosso had three movements. Fast movements typically employed a ritornello structure where soloists traded sections with the full orchestra. Baroque master J.S. Bach did not formally declare any of his pieces to be a concerto grosso, but several of his Brandenburg Concertos follow the concerto grosso format.
• Modern concerto grosso: The concerto grosso eventually gave way to other formats like the sinfonia concertante but enjoyed a twentieth-century revival thanks to composers who studied Baroque music as students. Modern practitioners of the concerto grosso include Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Alfred Schnittke. Like the Baroque masters, these composers envisioned the concerto grosso as instrumental music, but they expanded the ground rules of the form. A wider range of instruments appears in the modern concertino of a concerto grosso. Three-movement structures still exist, but many modern composers consider them optional. Modern composers use both a full orchestra and a chamber orchestra (a smaller group or orchestral instruments) for the tutti section.

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