Top 63 Concerto Quotes & Sayings

I'm not crying about anything or anyone in particular. The life I live I created for myself, and I wouldn't want it any different. I cry because in the universe there is something as beautiful as Kremer playing the Brains violin concerto.

I wanted a trumpet concerto that reflected Native American music because, well, there aren't any. I looked around for one but couldn't find anything. So it's a wide-open field.

If the orchestra's not enjoying itself, the concerto will not succeed, with the players confined to using half an inch of bow.

Harmony is pure love, for love is a concerto.

Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?'

As for my own music, I've never written a book about it. I'm not pedagogical... When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I'm not a self-conscious composer.

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.

It was Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto, Francesca Abraham realized as the radio alarm went off. Lively, unrelentingly upbeat, it was the perfect tempo in which to start the day. Covering her head with a pillow, she reached out blindly and urgently, desperate to shut the damn thing off.

Psychologists call it "defocused attention," where you broaden your horizons, let your mind float and drift a bit. Coffee keeps us sharp and alert. It's great if you're driving at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's not so great if you're trying to come up with the next violin concerto.

Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?

After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

A wedding is earth and water and a species of irreducible light and the flat belly of a harbor and a mango about to ripen and fall into gravity's caress and the waves subsiding and resuming their concerto in a minor key and the rush hour canceled by the stun of auspicious beginnings.

A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.

It's fine with me if people want to applaud between movements of a concerto. It doesn't bother me - it's part of performance experience. Sometimes when they applaud if I'm still playing it's not as good, but there's always a way around it. Actually the applause gives me a little rest and chance to stretch, too.

The way it works: The orchestra plays a few selections of its own and I terminate the first part of the programme on piano, usually with a movement from a Mozart concerto.

I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque.

It was always acting, singing and dancing that I loved. Not the horror of performing on the piano in front of an assembled audience of quiet people. I'd forget the piece just before I went out to do the concerto, the panic was too great . This was not anything that gave me pleasure. This was fulfilling somebody else's dream.

[Miranda Hentoff] was teaching once at Lincoln Center, and the hall was full of other professionals - musicians, professors, teachers. And she was explaining how [Béla] Bartok composed his second piano concerto. And she explained how the music was interwoven with the rhythms and what he had in his mind. And I was just stunned. This is a kid who used to work - on a piano with a cracked keyboard.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

You get more nervous in front of a lot of people. That's why, when you play a concerto, you play with a small orchestra, in some place where you don't feel that it is as important as Carnegie Hall.

Of course my books are translated into many languages. I have here, in my home, translations on my shelf of my books into forty-five different languages. Almost none of them I can read. I can read only the English editions. But, I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque. So, different musical instruments provide for different music.

There are many collaborations I'd like to explore. One is to co-write a rap concerto with Eminem.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

It's nice not to have the majority of the attention on me like there is when playing a concerto with an orchestra.

My life is a creative act--like a painting, or a concerto.

All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned, and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone's heart strings.

This kind of prelude was succeeded by the concerto itself which he executed with a degree of spirit and firmness that no one has ever pretended to equal.

There's a million people who can go out and play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto brilliantly, but we're the only ones who can do 'A Little Nightmare Music.'

Fact is that I played piano and performed, as a young kid, a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra . Don't forget I was only eleven-years-old and to be on the stage at that age had tremendous impact on me. Basically love for classical music and performing as a kid on the big stage probably led toward this decision, which meant that music is going to be my big love but also my profession.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.

I usually listen to the same thing over and over again: Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. And Leonard Cohen.

If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.

I can't stand being in Chicago anymore and hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto in the elevator. Because that shows me that when they come to the concert hall they listen to it in the same way.

It's fine with me if people want to applaud between movements of a concerto. It doesn't bother me - it's part of performance experience.

I did Bronislaw Kaper's tune. He wrote "On Green Dolphin Street." I mean, I did all those ballads, all them ballads from South America. All those tunes - the guitar concerto on Sketches Of Spain. All those are Spanish melodies. Some of them we made up ourselves.

I play a lot chamber music.As for something that's hard for me to play, before I leave this Earth I'm hoping to play Brahms' Second Piano Concerto.

I'm going to quit music. Then the government of Japan asked me to write a piano concerto - that was an offer I couldn't refuse, so that brought me back to music again.

Concert pianists are really afraid to try out the Beethoven Fourth Concerto if the Third happens to be their specialty. That's the piece they had such success with on Long Island, by George, and it will surely bring them success in Connecticut. So first there's tremendous conservatism. And then stagnation sets in. Or it certainly did in me.

Being a classical musician, you're doing many things anyway. One day you're doing Bach concerto and the next you're doing some avant-garde thing. It's just another hat that I'm allowed to wear.

Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting.

I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a different purpose, so that I don't actually stop writing - I just go to something else. Like going from a big symphony to a piano piece is great and very refreshing, I find. And then going from that to a big concerto, and then having to go out and play.

Here look at me. I'm Charlie, the son you wrote off the books? Not that I blame you for it, but here I am, all fixed up better than ever. Test me. Ask me questions. I speak twenty languages, living and dead; I'm a mathematical whiz, and I'm writing a piano concerto that will make them remember me long after I'm gone.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?

Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they're in their own home and nobody's there.

At a grand evening service in a church, my concerto created such a furor that the worshippers rushed out to keep the crowd outside the church quiet.

I love the name 'Stella McCartney.' It's a beautiful name the way it rolls off the tongue. A couple of years ago, I wrote a cello concerto and used that as the basis for the rhythmic and melodic structure of the main motif of the cello part.

Even if you are a pianist, your concerto repertoire is very limited compared to what your chamber repertoire would be if you were a chamber music pianist.

Edgar Meyer's violin concerto was the first piece of contemporary music I worked on in any depth. I was 18 or 19.

I'm usually woken by a vibration on my up-band. It's the gradual vibration for about ten seconds, and then the chimes of my blue light. It's just a way to wake gently. It all gently puts me into awake-mode. I play music off of my Sonos playlist. 'The Rachmaninoff Concerto 3 in D-minor', 1st movement.

The cello is a hero because of its register - its tenor voice. It is a masculine instrument, whereas the violin is feminine because of its soprano pitch. When the cello enters in the Dvorak Concerto, it is like a great orator.

I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.

Every orchestra is different. Sometimes, you're blown away by a particular musician. If I'm playing the Brahms concerto, it's crucial to have a great oboe player, because we work in tandem.

When I came to the United States, I appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show as a 13-year-old, and I played a Mendelssohn Concerto, and it sounded like a talented 13-year-old with a lot of promise. But it did not sound like a finished product.

I got to perform the [Jaques] Ibert Concertino Da Camera with a brilliant pianist at school named Chunga. I got to perform the [Alexander] Glazunov Concerto in senior year with our school orchestra and the Jewish Grossman orchestra. I won a scholarship from the Goldman band to perform the [Paul] Creston Concerto. Which I never played with them, but they still gave me the money.

Playing a concerto with Zubin is like being surrounded by a well-loved, cashmere-lined silk glove.

The virtuoso element in jazz playing, all those very fast runs in the upper extremes, simply doesn't appeal to me. That's why I don't want to make my concerto "virtuosic" in the sense of a technical show-off. I want a beautiful sound and a melodic and lyrical line. I am more interested in the way someone can play musically.

I'd forget the piece just before I went out to do the concerto, the panic was too great. This was not anything that gave me pleasure. This was fulfilling somebody else's dream.

Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.