Organ concerto

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 Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel wrote organ concertos with small orchestras, and with solo parts which rarely call for the organ pedal board. During the Classical period organ concerto became popular in many places, especially in Bavaria, Austria and Bohemia (whether called there a concerto, pastorella, or sonata), reaching a position of being almost an integral part of the church music tradition of jubilus character. From the Romantic era fewer works are known. Finally, there are some 20th- and 21st-century examples, of which the concerto by Francis Poulenc has entered the basic 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.

There is no clearly named "organ concerto" (i.e., for organ and orchestral ensemble) by Bach, but several cantata movements contain extensive obbligato organ parts. Versions of six of these cantata movements had a later incarnation in the two harpsichord concertos BWV 1052 and BWV 1053. Cantata 35 contains two instrumental Sinfonias with organ solo, the first of which agrees with the fragmentary keyboard concerto BWV1059. [1]. (A recording of a reconstruction of this as an organ concerto was made by Ton Koopman. [2])

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