During the Baroque Age, concertos for two or more solo instruments (quite apart from those works that derived from the tradition of the concerto grosso) offered composers an interesting choice of combinations and made an entertaining change for audiences. On hearing the Concerto for violin, cello, strings and continuo RV 544, no contemporary theorist would have voiced the same fundamental objections as those expressed some 150 years later by Hanslick in the context of Brahms’s Double Concerto. Do we not have something similar in painting? Artists avoid double portraits and prefer not to immortalize man and wife on a single canvas.” This clear aesthetic preference for the solo concerto dates from an age of middle-class concert halls in which audiences admired and fêted itinerant instrumental virtuosos, who were themselves more interested in solo concertos - for where is the leading violinist or cellist willing to share the public’s adulation with a colleague, be he ever so illustrious? Things were different in Vivaldi’s day.
But if there is a single musical form that one can legitimately claim rests on the superior might of a single victorious hero, it is the concerto. A double concerto is like a drama that has two heroes instead of one by laying common claim to our sympathy and admiration, they simply get in each other’s way. The much-feared doyen of Viennese critics, Eduard Hanslick, provided perhaps the most pertinent expression of the aesthetic reservations of his time: “The genre is problematical by its very nature.
102, critical voices were quickly raised. By the 19th century, however, the double concerto - unlike its solo counterpart - had long since fallen from favour, with the result that when a composer such as Brahms ventured into this field with his famous Double Concerto for violin and cello op. Historically speaking, the Baroque concerto doppio – the double concerto or concerto for two solo instruments - is coeval with the single concerto.
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