Concerto Quotes

#1. 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.'

Aleksey Igudesman

#2. 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.

Daniel Barenboim

#3. 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.

Joshua Bell

#4. 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.

Naomi Ragen

#5. 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.

David Finckel

#6. 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.

Gene Weingarten

#7. now routinely listen to her. To have your mind explode, search "Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1 FULL Argerich Charles Dutoit" and check out minute 31.

Timothy Ferriss

#8. 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?

Douglas Adams

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

Sue Townsend

#10. 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.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#11. 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.

Mark McMorris

#12. Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing.

Ayn Rand

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

Gyorgy Ligeti

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

Zubin Mehta

#15. 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.

George Shearing

#16. He would much rather hear a piano being demolished by illegal bulldozers than a Mozart concerto

Andy Stanton

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

Igor Stravinsky

#18. I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger

Mary Karr

#19. Harmony is pure love, for love is a concerto.

Lope De Vega

#20. 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.

Itzhak Perlman

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

Nigel Kennedy

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

Ram Dass

#23. Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

Aaron Copland

#24. 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.

Linda Lavin

#25. The sky is the color of gray flannel, the darkness broken only by the dormer window of another early riser. The woman who lives in that attic painted her walls yellow, and the reflected light bounces out like a spring crocus. If light were sound, her window would be playing a concerto.

Eloisa James

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

Garrison Keillor

#27. At the end of the competition, I played the Liszt concerto and I felt my head was on the block. Well, I won.

Andre Boucourechliev

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

Eduard Hanslick

#29. The room, as she saw it, was a web of motion, a symphony of mischievou dancing particles quite like the smooth and placid notes of a fine concerto.

Mark Helprin

#30. 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.

Claude Debussy

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

Leila Josefowicz

#32. 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.

Peter Hoeg

#33. 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.

Christopher Moore

#34. The concerto's beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body.

Madeleine Thien

#35. 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.

Robert D. Hare

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

Isaac Stern

#37. So travel with me, beyond the small illusions. Dance with me among the clouds, where infinite dreams show not-yet-discovered truths of being. Let the wind whisper passionately against your mouth, inhale deep the endless creativity, dance with the fluttering petals of my spirits concerto.

Cheri Bauer

#38. 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.

John Hawkins

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

Alfred Schnittke

#40. So it is with the concerto of our lives. Individual notes must be learned and played and practiced before we achieve harmony. And above all, we must learn how to pause.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

#41. Concerto soloists need applause. Though virtue is said to be its own reward, no one ever said that about virtuosity.

Joseph Kerman

#42. 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.

Condoleezza Rice

#43. 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.

Eric Weiner

#44. 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.

Joshua Bell

#45. 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.

Itzhak Perlman

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

Evelyn Glennie