Evolution of the Genre of the Piano Concerto

Abstract

The paper outlines the features of emergence and development of the piano concerto on its way towards drama from a historical perspective, analyses specific features of its genre nature, and reveals the types of the concerto’s dramaturgy differing from one another in form and style of the interaction between the soloist and the orchestra. The paper demonstrates that the piano concerto followed the path of development of an individual performer principle, and afterward that of a dialogical balance between the orchestra and the piano part, which was determined by the degree of composers’ innovative achievements and the dominant aesthetic paradigm. In terms of highlighting the genre of the piano concerto and genre specificity of piano and orchestral music, the compositional-analytical approach proved to be productive. The analysis revealed that the movement towards drama in the historical perspective of the piano concerto was uneven with occasional drifts towards the so-called “style brilliant.” Depending on the type of drama, the correlation between the solo and the orchestra changed. In the 20th century, due to the radical transformation of the cultural paradigm, the genre of the concerto was restructured; composers abandoned traditional forms and tried to create an individual project form for each work. The study indicates the parameters of change in the genre, form, and style of the piano concerto under the influence of the newest paradigm of the time: repudiation of the traditional genre forms, creation of hybrid forms such as“anti-genre,” “hypergenre,” or a complete negation of the genre and creation of an individual genre project.