Eino Tamberg's Concerto Grosso, Op. 5, was composed in 1956. It was awarded a gold medal at the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students the following year and was subsequently performed through both the Eastern and Western Blocs, launching the Estonian composer's career.
Eino Tamberg was an Estonian composer.
The 6th World Festival of Youth and Students was opened on 28 July 1957, in Moscow, Soviet Union. The festival attracted 34,000 people from 130 countries. This became possible after the political changes initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. It was the first World Festival of Youth and Students held in the Soviet Union.
The Eastern Bloc was the group of Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia and Southeast Asia under the hegemony of the Soviet Union (USSR) during the Cold War (1947–1991) in opposition to the non-Communist Western Bloc. Generally, in Western Europe the term Eastern Bloc comprised the USSR and its East European satellite-states in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon); in Asia, the Socialist bloc comprised the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Lao People's Democratic Republic and the People's Republic of Kampuchea; the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the People's Republic of China ; and in the Americas, the Communist Bloc included the Caribbean Republic of Cuba, since 1961.
Tamberg's Concerto Grosso is scored for a wind quintet consisting of flute, clarinet, trumpet, alto saxophone and bassoon, piano, percussion and a string orchestra, and consists of three movements lasting ca. 25 minutes:
A wind quintet, also known as a woodwind quintet, is a group of five wind players. Some quintets alternatively use an English horn instead of a French horn. The term also applies to a composition for such a group.
The flute is a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening. According to the instrument classification of Hornbostel–Sachs, flutes are categorized as edge-blown aerophones. A musician who plays the flute can be referred to as a flute player, flautist, flutist or, less commonly, fluter or flutenist.
The clarinet is a musical-instrument family belonging to the group known as the woodwind instruments. It has a single-reed mouthpiece, a straight, cylindrical tube with an almost cylindrical bore, and a flared bell. A person who plays a clarinet is called a clarinetist.
- Allegro moderato
- Adagio
- Allegro molto quasi toccata
A high-spirited neoclassical composition, it is representative of the mild modernism promoted by the Soviet regime though the Thaw after years of harsh artistic repression, and it is notable for its use of the saxophone, which had been banned in 1949 as a decadent instrument. Tamberg would use no less than three saxophones in his next composition, the Symphonic Dances.
Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the interwar period, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint. As such, neoclassicism was a reaction against the unrestrained emotionalism and perceived formlessness of late Romanticism, as well as a "call to order" after the experimental ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The neoclassical impulse found its expression in such features as the use of pared-down performing forces, an emphasis on rhythm and on contrapuntal texture, an updated or expanded tonal harmony, and a concentration on absolute music as opposed to Romantic program music.
In music, modernism is a philosophical and aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.
Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.
For information about the government, see Government of the Soviet Union.
