An organ concerto is a piece of music, an instrumental concerto for a pipe organ soloist with an orchestra. The form first evolves in the 18th century, when composers including George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach wrote organ concertos with small orchestras, and with solo parts which rarely call for the organ pedal board. A few Classical and Romantic works are extant. Finally, there are some 20th- and 21st-century examples, of which the concerto by Francis Poulenc has entered the repertoire, and is quite frequently played.
The organ concerto form is not usually taken to include orchestral works that call for an organ used as an extra orchestral section, examples of which include the Third Symphony of Camille Saint-Saëns, Gustav Holst's The Planets or Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.
Famous quotes containing the word organ:
“But alas! I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)