Most difficult concerto ever?
I'm curious to find out what people think is the most difficult violin concerto ever written.
Replies (95)
Ligeti?
Britten, Joachim, Elgar
I want to see someone do a ridiculous version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Something to put Erlkonig to shame.
I have to say, Britten is the most difficult concerto I've worked on in terms of technical obstacles.
Schoenberg (personal chops sadly lacking)
Mozart A Major K 219 (personal chops still lacking, but at least I can try!)
How hard you guys think is Rochberg (not the Stern version but the original one)? Harder than Ligeti?
I believe Milstein said there's no such thing as being difficult, either you can play or you can't play. There's a lot of truth to this. To me, most concerti are all difficult.
I can't; therefore I play.
I would say its quite subjective to say the MOST difficult but Britten is certainly a top 5
Schoenberg? Heifetz said he need 6 fingers to play it.
Armand:
Dohnyani wrote a set of variations on Twinkle for piano and orchestra...not sure how difficult it is for pianists but it is certainly a virtuoso piece.
Kevin
Very interesting responses! I actually haven't heard the Ligeti, Schoenberg, or Britten. How do these compare to the Nicholas Maw concerto or Bartok no. 2?
It's a very individual thing. Some players have a kind of overall technical apparatus that makes concerto X more do-able than concerto Y. Others, equally talented and accomplished will feel the opposite. I also feel that one's particular kind of musicality and emotions factor in as well. If one has srong feelings for a piece it can help toward overcoming technical hurdles.
Someone mentioned Elgar, for example. Oddly enough I just decided to start to review it today, never having gotten it in my fingers in the past to any sort of performance level. But I'd sooner perform that, or some other 'little tidbits' such as Brahms, Sibelius, or Paganini #1, than the Prokoffiev #2, which was the hardest thing for me that I studied back when I took lessons, or say, Bartok #2, which I could never get into just as a listener. (I like #1.)
Heifetz, in an interview said that the Mozart and Beethoven were the hardest concertos "and", he added, "I'm talking technically, too!" I read somehere that Ricci and Oliveira, no mean technicians, both agreed that the Ginastera is the hardest.
Several come to my mind. Shoenberg, Ginastera, and perhaps Penderecki 1.
I think Prokofiev 1 is harder than no. 2.
Schoenberg sounded pretty impossible to me.
I've never even heard the Schoenberg. Has Joachim already been mentioned?
I think it is Ernst.
It must be some of the Viotti concertos. It is just frases stapled on top of each other. I simply do not understand them all. The are to difficullt.
Or what about Ysaye no 1? I can't even find the score - it is THAT hard!
Has anyone tried playing the Miklos Rozsa violin concerto. That one sounded crazy hard to me...
Haven't tried yet, but I want to! What a neat piece! It's like Magyar-peasant meets Hollywood-schmaltz meets Heifetz-virtuosity. Good stuff.
Oh boy, I was just listening to the Ginastera the other day and it sounds pretty nasty.
The good news is that I certainly will never be trying to play any of those.
im surprised no one has mentioned stravinsky...
i would say the mendelssohn and any mozart concerto. mozart is always hard and the mendelssohn has probably gotta be the most well known concerto and its getting really hard to find a perfect perfomance of it in my books
Well, it depends on what you mean by difficult. Surely by any definition, Schoenberg Concerto is right up there. I think the famous quote is that a violinist said that you would need an extra finger to play it and the composer replied, "I can wait." When I bought the music and score to it many years ago at Frank Music in NYC, Mr. Frank said, "you know it is a whole lot easier to buy the music to this piece than to play it."
What about the Brahms Concerto? I havent even dreamed of actually attempting it in the near future (Im on Mendelssohn now), but I have heard that that is the hardest.
Well the Brahms was written in a way that isn't convenient for a violinist. To me there are more awkward sounding concertos, but I'll let you know once I learned more of them.
The Brahms is extremely challenging and awkward - and wonderful! With most other pieces, if I've put a good amount of work into it in the past, I'm ahead of the game when I come to review it. With the Brahms, each time I've reviewed it, it felt like I was starting from scratch!
ernst violin concerto 2
Vivaldi a minor
Bill, I second that :)
Oh yes vivaldi of course! But wait, what about the seitz concertos??
-EG
One Seitz fits all?
Well, once I heard from a teacher (during a masterclass in london), that for him the most difficult concerto was Beethoven.
In my personal opinion, the most difficult concerto i've ever heard (and seen..) it's the PENDERECKI violin concerto NUMBER 2 , written and played by anne sophie mutter: simply astonishing! It's such a beautiful piece, she said to me once (and it is so true), but unfortunately so a few does know it.
I suggest to buy the cd, or, better than all, DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO ON EMULE: you will SEE the thrilling performance of the premiere in 1995 with the composer among the audience...
After having seen the cadenza of this concerto I believe that god does exist: she is.
I almost literally bumped into Penderecki at a contemporary music festival in Stavanger, Norway about ten years ago--of course this was long before I was mature enough to appreciate most of his music, but it was still cool to see him. :)
I've noticed that there are two kinds of Hardest Concerto Ever: the insane finger-breaking tonality-stretching brain-exhausting stuff like the Ligeti and Penderecki, and the sublimely simple, Apollonian, pure and clean Classicism like Beethoven and Mozart.
Heifetz did warn about the difficulty of the Mozart and Beethoven concerti. Try to find a Grumiaux recording of a Mozart concerto. I think he, to use Mozart's expression, "flows like oil" and sings like a nightingale.
After Itzhak Perlman performed the Barber violin concerto at a National Symphony concert in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2005, there was a question and answer session with the audience, and someone asked Mr. Perlman which concerto was the most difficult. His response was the Beethoven concerto, not because it is technically the most challenging but, he said, because it consists largely of scales and arpeggios and you have to figure out what to do with them.
Greetings,
Grumiuax seemed to have this extraordinary innate feeling for tempo and flow in the Mozart concertos. Eveb after listening to some other really great players he can come across like a breath of fresh air.
Cheers,
Buri
The Miklos Rozsa violin concerto was just recorded by Anastasia Khitruk for Naxos, release in September 2007. It is indeed hard to play.
I guess Bartok #2
Greetings,
Amy is the first person to answer correctly. First prize is a crate of prunes,
Cheers,
Buri
I'm afraid to know what the second prize is, and am therefore cancelling my guess.
The Brahms for difficulty/challenge and for lyrical beauty.
Art is not about difficulty.
Difficulty can't be measured. Its rather the question how close somebody can get to the composers thought. In this respect any concerto can be very easy or very difficult. Nowadays we are too much focused on technically cleanliness as a measure on how good a violinist can handle his repertoire. However I listened to performances not technically perfect but thrilling and vice versa absolute perfect performanceses which I found completely boring.
Certainly there are concertos which go quicker into your fingers than others but this doesn't has any meaning to their artistic value. The Ernst concerto is as well amongst the top ten in this respect, but its difficulty doesn't express anything artistically. Its the narcistic output of an highly skilled violinist and rightfully so became almost forgotten.
My personal choise (even though I am only an amateur violinist) is the Brahms concerto for its depth in thoughts and its complexity. Thats why all those highly skilled prodegee kids don't touch it.
I'm begining to think that Tchaikovsky is the hardest, to make it interesting and not try to thoughtlessly copy whatever you heard some Russian do 50 years ago.
I am so sick of that concerto now....
That and Sibelius. Unfortunately I'm at violin camp right now and for some reason none of these kids play sonatas. Just "Tchaik" and Carmen all day long...
I have to agree that being able to transcend technical difficulty can make some things quite enjoyable. I've hated Paganini 1 for a long time, but I recently had the good fortune to skulk outside a doorway and hear a teenage girl play it with such mastery, control, and conviction in her musicality that I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's really playing that like which convinces you that you are in the presence of a gift from another reality. If anyone can make it to Hudson, OH on July 1st, you should do it to come hear her.
Dear Joel, I'm envious! Must be something to listen to a concerto with the "owner" playing! But I disagree about the Ernst Concerto: I can't imagine any violinist making this lot of notes sound interesting...Heifetz himself is reported to have mastered it "w/honors" as a child, but has never recorded/played it in concert AFAIK. And who writes has learned (Was at least able to play the notes, more or less in tempo) all this stuff in the remote past...
Of course, I'm not a professional musician, but I've always thought that the most difficult concerto of all time has always been the one I happen to be working on at the moment.
:) Sandy
Definitely John Stump's Faerie's Air and Death Waltz, from "A Tribute to Zdenko G. Fibich".
http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/1159951.html
Milstein did say either you can either play it or you can't. But he was also asked what was the hardest piece he ever played and he said "Mephisto Waltz", his own version of the Lizt piece. I know this is not a concerto but it is a barnburner. Rachel Barton has recorded it and its good.
Perlman was right: the hardest concerto is the Beethoven. Very tough to make it sound like music and not like scales and arpeggios.
I'd put the Schonberg up there as the most demanding, along with Penderecki. Their difficulty is as much for the ear as it is for the fingers: hard to play, and equally hard for many listeners to comprehend.
3 professional violinists mentioned apart of 2th Joachim, 1th Vieuxtemps.
Ligeti? Schoenberg? regardless of technical difficuly, surely they are harder to listen to than to play?!!
In the "well know" category, Sibelius, from the exotic list, Schoenberg, Ernst, Ligeti and Ginastera sound pretty hard.
I heard the Schoenberg and Elgar concertos were relentless
Tischenko No.2
My former teacher Fredell Lack performed the Roger Sessions Concerto many years ago, and as I recall she commented at the time that it was the most difficult concerto in the literature. (I've never heard the piece myself.)
I think it's the Wieniawski in F minor (no. 1). "ViolinMasterclass.com" has this listed as grade ten (on a scale of one to ten). Making this concerto both technically and musically gorgeous is a job for only virtuosos!
Mozart 5. Seriously.
Being a listener and not a violinist (at least not since I was 15), I can't comment about the difficulties of playing any of the above mentioned pieces. I do love the old story about the Barber concerto: commissioned by a patron for a young violinist who complained that the first two movements did not allow him to show his virtuosity. Barber says just wait for the finale. The finale arrives and the violinist now complains that it is unplayable.
By the way, I was glad to see the Ligetti discussed here. I find it an interesting piece for the listener, certainly challenging if you are not used to some of the more "out there" pieces. Anyway, Jennifer Koh is playing this next week in six(!) free(!) performances at various Churches around Cleveland next week. I will be making the drive from Pittsburgh as I can't imagine when I will have another chance to see Ligetti's concerto live. Here is a link:
http://www.citymusiccleveland.org/Concerts/details.php?id=153
Joshua Bell said in an interview somewhere that the Nicholas Maw concerto (written for him) was so difficult that, after having worked it up for a recording, he won't perform it anymore.
Mara, I think I actually find Mozart 4 more challenging than Mozart 5. From a musical standpoint, I find it less demonstrative in terms of character, and so it's more difficult for me to avoid having it all sound the same.
Might also be because I worked on Mozart 4 with at least five different teachers and ended up confused about which ideas were actually mine...
Ah, perhaps. I haven't done Mozart 4. My point was just Mozart in general.
http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/1159951.html> I think some college team of students needs to make a MIDI of that and see what it sounds like lol.
I never really liked playing pizzicato...unless it's left hand pizzicato (like Paganini) so that's teh reason I really don't like prokofiev (#1 and #2)
Brahms is written awkwardly for violinist...Wieniawski said it was unplayable and Auer said he would never play it. Auer said Tchaikovsky VC was unplayable, however.
Paganini sounds (and probably IS) hard technically
Mozart's violin concertoes are all difficult to play well. His No.4 may be the most difficult among all.
Definitely the Joachim hungarian concerto. Goodness. It's giving me migraines learning it!
What ever piece I'm working on at the moment because the most difficult piece.
Geez, Joachim #2 isn't thaaaat difficult...#1 is from a more immature Joachim and is a bit worse...though not nearly as impressive as the #2 of course ;-)
Has anyone typed "Britten" yet?
i'm currently working on the rondo of lalo's symphonie espagnole. i know its no where near the major romantic concerti such as beethoven, or brahms, or elgar, etc...
but to play it well, isn't that a huge challenge? and how difficult is it considering that we are looking at the rondo movement alone, not just the entire symphonie espagnole?
also. if i'm playing the rondo well, do u think i could handle the bartok concerto 1 next? it's considered as comtemperary, right?
Schoenberg if there was one that we could actually say is most difficult.
But, I don't think there is any one aspect of anything that could make something the hardest thing out there. Like someone said before, there are the virtuosic ones that require immense technique, but like the Beethoven, requires great intonation and musicality. I think that balance is most difficult to acheive.
I'm a little surprised no one has said the Tchaikovsky. Through listening to recordings and studying scores it is the most difficult for what it would take out of me.
But everyone is different and will have something more difficult that another would find easy:)
Most difficult viola concerto: Bartok...
I was also under the impression the Schoenberg was the most difficult
Bartok is not the most difficult viola concerto...and it is by far easier then the violin concerto. Same deal with Walton.
Hardest for left hand...Ernst? Scheonberg?
Bartok is not the most difficult viola concerto Agreed, it's just the most played.
My own yardstick: If I can't play it well, it might be hard. If I can, it isn't.
OK, I'll bite. What is the most difficult viola concerto? The Bartok (and Bartok in general) seems the most difficult that I've run across.
What Michael Divino said. Mind you, My opinion is coming from a researcher/observer's mind, but Michael's comments seem to echo what I've heard from some top notch violinists. And I can certainly see (or rather, hear) the challenges, for the aforementioned reasons, in both concertos.
Well, off the top of my head, the Penderecki viola concerto is way harder then Bartok. And then for your double stops and up-bow staccato there's the Paganini Sonata for Grand Viola.
Thanks Terez. Here's a good question for this thread-
Would you rather have virtuosic technique or unparalled musicality and intonation?
Nick - I conceed defeat. The Pendereck does seem to be much more difficult than the Bartok, but I like the sound of it! I still can't make it past the first line of the Bartok however ;) Maybe in another 5 years.... ::::sigh::::
Michael, with a true virtuoso there is no choosing.
There are concertos for violin written that no one will ever be able to play
Ginastera´s is one of the most demanding of the ones that are performed with decent accuracy and recorded for sure, Ligeti´s and both of Penderecki´s are worth mentioning as well of course
I don´t know if Fernehough or Klaus Hubler or one of those people composed a violin concerto I am pretty sure that that it would be extremely hard to play
Klaus Hubler wrote the most demanding string quartet that is actually playable as far as I know
"There are concertos for violin written that no one will ever be able to play"
Example? I don't really believe this statement. Leopold Auer once thought the Tchaikovsky violin concerto was "unplayable," yet today, it's one of the standards... Yes, there are works far harder than that, but it seems that no matter what a composer writes, someone somewhere will find a way to play it.
So true, Jonathan.
"Example? I don't really believe this statement. Leopold Auer once thought the Tchaikovsky violin concerto was "unplayable," yet today, it's one of the standards... Yes, there are works far harder than that, but it seems that no matter what a composer writes, someone somewhere will find a way to play it."
Even I can write a concerto that no one will ever be able to play.
there are many contemporary composers that has written pieces that are impossible to play unless you are a machine or computer
"there are many contemporary composers that has written pieces that are impossible to play unless you are a machine or computer"
If this is correct, then it indicates a degree of incompetence on the part of those particular composers. Better to have some consultation along the way as it's being written.
No composer in their right mind would ever write an unplayable piece. It's everything against what composing is about. They are taking ideas and inspiration and putting them down into music to share with you. Why would they want to take all that work and have it be known as the piece which was never heard by anyone?
The reason composers work with a musician along the way is to change things and make them more practical. Like said before, the Schoenberg was said to be unplayable yet Hilary Hahn provides one of the best performances around. The Tchaiikovsky was also one which was said impossible and yet it is played by almost every violinist that makes it to "that level" in their life time.
Your comments should have a little more research before you bluntly state things.
"there are many contemporary composers that has written pieces that are impossible to play unless you are a machine or computer"
as an engineering student who constantly have to think about efficiency and practicality, i'd say that is a complete waste of time with no real contribution to the musical world. creative, but useless. i guess those composers have way too much free time and/or don't have to worry about making a living.
Your comments should have a little more research before you bluntly state things.
Paul - so should yours.
The only violinists of record calling the Tchai unplayable (of who knows how many virtuosi) was the same guy who published his own "improved" version that is harder to play and the taught his students to play it. Some even before their teens.
The only reason Auer called it unplayable was because he didn't want to play it. It says nothing about if no one could or could not play it at the time. History on the other hand shows that it was both played and playable.
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April 22, 2007 at 11:44 PM · The never-ending question returns