Cello Concertos 𝄞

To watch the most popular cello concertos of the composers, just click on the images.

Edward Elgar

Antonín Dvořák

Camille Saint-Saëns

Robert Schumann

Joseph Haydn

Dmitri Shostakovich

Luigi Boccherini

Felix Mendelssohn

Johannes Brahms

Aram Chatsjatoerjan

Sergej Prokofiev

Krzysztof Penderecki

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Max Bruch

Gerald Finzi

Édouard Lalo

Ernest Bloch

Ernő Dohnányi

John Tavener

William Walton

Nikolaj Mjaskovski

Pēteris Vasks

Erkki-Sven Tüür

Witold Lutosławski

Samuel Barber

Paul Hindemith

Unlike the violin, the cello had to face the competition of the viola da gamba, an older and highly established instrument during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Because of this, very few important cello concertos were written before the 19th century, except for the compositions of Vivaldi, C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and Boccherini. The recognition as a solo instrument only came during the period of Romanticism, with the concertos of Schumann, Saint-Saëns and Dvořák. Since then, concertos for cello have become more and more frequent. The composers of the twentieth century have made the cello a standard solo instrument, along with the conventional piano and violin.

Among the most notable concertos of the first half of the century are those of Elgar, Prokofiev, Barber and Hindemith. Most composers after World War II (Shostakovich, Ligeti, Britten, Lutoslawski and Penderecki, among others) have written at least one.

A special consideration that composers must take with the cello, as well as all the other low-range instruments, is with the question of projection in comparison with the rest of the orchestra. In contrast to instruments such as the violin, the high range of which is quite easily above the orchestra, the lower notes of the cello can easily be lost if the cello does not play solo or almost solo. This forced composers to deliberately quite down the orchestra while the cello played in the lower registers.