Back in Fashion: The Concerto Form Receives Wider Contemporary Attention

By Laurence Vittes | From the November/December 2025 issue of Strings

Concertos are back—not as museum relics but as living declarations of identity, resilience, and renewal. Since 2021, nearly 60 new works for violin, viola, and cello have been introduced worldwide—split almost evenly between the three instruments, with the US dominating the cello, and the viola booming abroad. For decades, the concerto was a virtuoso’s vehicle; now it is a forum for personal statements and collective recovery.

The surge is not incidental. In the wake of Covid, when orchestras were scrambling for relevance and performers rethinking their identities, the concerto offered a perfect canvas. It allowed composers and soloists alike to make direct statements about their time, their heritage, their sense of belonging, their passions, their concerns.

The results are everywhere. In 2025 alone, Magnus Lindberg’s Viola Concerto stormed into the US with Lawrence Power and the St. Louis Symphony; Nico Muhly’s Violin Concerto premiered at the New York Philharmonic with Renaud Capuçon; and Lisa Bielawa’s Pulse—her second violin concerto—launched with Tessa Lark and the Louisville Orchestra before heading to Boston, Cincinnati, and Santa Fe. (For a closer look at the concerto commissions of violinist Anne Akiko Meyers see this feature.)

On the cello front: Thomas Larcher’s returning into darkness, unveiled by Alisa
Weilerstein and the New York Philharmonic; Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Before we fall by Johannes Moser and the San Francisco Symphony; Julia Adolphe’s Chrysalis by Seth Parker Woods and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Richard Blackford’s The Recovery of Paradise by Weilerstein in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic.

And the boundaries of concerto tradition keep bending. Joshua Bell’s Elements, premiered by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, included five movements, each written by a different composer inspired by a unique element: Kevin Puts (Earth), Edgar Meyer (Water), Jake Heggie (Fire), Jennifer Higdon (Air), and Jessie Montgomery (Space). Roberto Sierra’s Electric Violin Concerto premiered with the American Symphony; Lowell Liebermann’s Concerto for Violin, Ancient Greek Lyre, and Orchestra debuted in Thessaloniki; and Jan Vogler presented Sean Shepherd’s choral hybrid On a Clear Day with the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra and a variety of vocal outfits. The concerto, more than any other form, epitomizes how quickly classical music regenerates when given space.

Bielawa, amid the rollout of Pulse, senses both opportunity and fragility. “It feels like this is a good time to be a composer,” she tells me, even as she acknowledges shaky economics. “The projects that I’m doing are moving forward robustly, despite the fact that the funding might be short-lived or teetering.”

Since Pulse was built around Tessa Lark, Bielawa shadowed her in concert, absorbing her tone and Appalachian roots and folding those influences into cadenzas and fiddle passages. “A concerto is really for a person, not just an instrument,” she insists. Artistic responsibility is also a continuing focus: “How do we behold [other traditions] and treat them with the dignity they deserve—how do we use that as an invitation for a dialogue rather than appropriating it?” she says.

For Lark, supporting contemporary music is a mandate. “As a living performer, it’s my duty to make sure people have a chance to write a bunch of violin concertos—so there’s repertoire that has a chance to continue on centuries beyond,” she says. She feels that her collaboration with Bielawa produced not just a premiere but a statement about legacy: New concertos must be given the chance to join the canon.

At Rice University, Anthony Brandt contributed to the Shepherd School’s 50th-anniversary celebrations with a Cello Concerto written for longtime colleague Norman Fischer, premiered with the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra. “Norman, along with his wife Jeanne, has been the beating heart of the school,” Brandt explains. “The piece reflects his spirit of bridging past and present—adventurous yet rooted in tradition.”

Fischer shaped the concerto through bar-by-bar collaboration, ensuring it “rang and sounded really good,” offering technical guidance and tonal advice. At one point he convinced Brandt to move the final cadence from A-flat to A so the cello could ring on its open string. “The whole instrument lit up,” Fischer recalls. He likens the score to a braid of cello and orchestra lines with little rest for the soloist. “It’s like planting a seed in the opening bar and watching everything grow.”

For Fischer, formerly of the Concord Quartet and whose career has included premiering dozens of new works, the collaboration was a reminder that the most enduring works often emerge from direct dialogue. “New works are like children,” he says. “They’re born in rehearsal, but then they go on to have their own lives.”

Cellist Johannes Moser says a common musical language powered Thorvaldsdottir’s Before we fall, co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and the BBC Proms. “Anna is a cellist herself and knows exactly what to write in order to extrapolate her sound world,” he tells me. The commissioning was coalition-building: San Francisco secured the premiere, the BBC took the European debut, and other orchestras quickly followed.

The premiere was overwhelming. “There is so much preparation, so much expectation,” he says. “At the first performance, I almost had to take a step back and let the piece breathe.” The payoff is visceral: “Contemporary voices reflect a reality in which we are all experts. Contemporary art makes me feel alive.”

Gone are the days of audiences skittish about hearing something they don’t already know, at least according to violist Timothy Ridout. He sees audiences eager for something new. “Promoters are quite interested in finding something off the beaten track,” he says. His describes his recent commission—Mark Simpson’s Hold Your Heart in Your Teeth—as “extremely passionate and dramatic, like a movie full of cliffhangers. I would call it hyper-romantic music.”

Next in line for Ridout is a commissioned concerto by Filippo Del Corno, still in sketches. “It’s a real voyage of discovery,” he says. Ridout sees today’s surge as a return to earlier norms. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, new music dominated the programs. We’re getting back to that spirit.”

For former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, the creative driver in new music is depth of relationship. Andy Akiho’s Nisei grew out of more than a decade of collaboration. “We even used to have a band together!” Zeigler says. “He likes to say he was thinking of me for every single note . . . it is not a ‘cello’ concerto but a ‘Jeff Zeigler’ concerto.”

Zeigler’s perspective remains long term. “I feel a strong obligation to the future of the art form . . . I’m also thinking of cellists 100 years from now.” His pipeline includes a concerto by Paola Prestini and a consortium for a new work by Viet Cuong.

Cellist Jan Vogler, an enthusiastic supporter of contemporary music, also sees the big picture. “I personally feel a stronger urge to focus on new commissions—perhaps realizing that it is also a volume game. The more new pieces we inspire or are part of, the more masterworks might be among them.”

Perhaps with that in mind, composer and guitarist D. J. Sparr always knew he wanted to write a viola concerto for his wife, Kimberly Sparr, and it turned out to be Extended Play, which she premiered with the Memphis Symphony. “Violas needed a piece that rocks,” he says. Structured like an EP, with Van Halen–inspired movement titles, the score casts the string section as a rock band: “Violin 2 is the snare drum, cellos the bass drum, violin 1 the hi-hat.” What does he hope to hear from the audience? “Holy cow, I didn’t know the viola could be so exciting!”

Together, these voices epitomize change. The concerto is no longer merely a test of virtuosity. It is a stage for collaboration, a reflection of our time, and a laboratory for works that may still be played 100 years from now. If one line captures this moment, it is Johannes Moser’s: “Contemporary concertos reflect our reality.”