Unusual
concertos (i.e. concertos for unusual solo instruments and orchestra)
have been a special interest of mine for over two decades. I define
'unusual' as a concerto with orchestra for any solo instrument other than piano or violin. Let's look at the history
of concertos as a bit of background. Until the start of the romantic
period, many concertante instruments were used, but in the romantic era,
piano and violin really started to dominate the field, accounting for
90%+ of all concertos. The 20th century was another turning point.
Although piano and violin concertos were still composed regularly,
concertos for other instruments started to appear as well. In recent
decades, this was further extended with many non-Western instruments and
electronic instruments coming into the picture.
For
the overview I prepared on this site, I'm limiting candidate
compositions to those clearly identified as concertos or concertinos by
the composer, or those that are generally accepted to be concertos in
case the composer gave the work a title. This rules out candidate 'instruments' like
typewriter (Anderson) and vacuum cleaner (Arnold). Also, the soloist must
be audible - this might seem a superfluous demand, but there are
concertos for florist and orchestra, and for conductor and
orchestra.... Not quite as extreme, but I've also omitted Tan Dun's water concerto and paper concerto, which are available on DVD only, where the visual aspect tends to be more intriguing than the actual sounds.
Almost all
examples given for each concerto are for commercial recordings (LP and/or CD) - they not necessarily my favourite concertos for the instruments, because I aimed to include less well known composers. In a few cases where such recordings are not available, I included a link to YouTube or Vimeo. These are distinguished by a star at the end of the label. I have focused on the period from 1900 until now for the selected examples (although a few older concertos were included).
Concertos for a defined named group of players (e.g. String Quartet, Rock Band, Piano Trio, Jazz ensemble) and orchestra could have been included in this overview, but for the time being I decided to leave them out. Although double and triple concertos with unusual
instrument combinations exist (e.g. Concerto for Violin, Horn and
Orchestra by Ethel Smyth, or Concerto for Violin, Cello, Bayan and
Orchestra by Sofia Gubaidulina), they will not feature in this
overview either.
The total number of concertos in this overview is now 101.