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Music open thread: Mandolin concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-06-30
Arabs have the oud and Jews have… the mandolin? For a long time, I was unaware of the Jewish heritage of the mandolin. To be more precise, I didn’t learn about that aspect of the mandolin until about a month ago, when I started researching this open thread in earnest. Though I should also note that there are quite a few phenomenal Jewish oud players today and throughout history.
As a composer, and briefly a mandolin beginner who did not progress very far, I’d been much more aware of the mandolin’s similarities to the violin.
The mandolin has eight strings which can be tuned to eight distinct pitches, but are generally tuned in pairs. Thus for the most part, a composer can think of the mandolin as having four strings, and he or she generally does not need to indicate to the performer which strings to use for any particular note, any more than he or she would make such indications to a violinist.
The standard tuning of the mandolin is effectively the same as that of the violin: G-D-A-E. But the violin is most frequently played with a bow, whereas the mandolin is almost never bowed.
The mandolin I had was a “bluegrass” mandolin with an almost flat back, whereas the players in the videos below seem to be using instruments with backs curved more like an oud’s back. I loved the sound of my mandolin, but the bridge kept slipping, and worst of all for me, the E-strings felt like cheese slicers. I should never complain about guitar calluses.
After a couple of years of not practicing, I sold my mandolin. I hardly ever practice my ukulele either, but I still have that instrument. The mandolin is not for me to play, but it is still for me to appreciate and maybe write some music for it eventually.
Avi Avital, on the other hand, took to the mandolin quite naturally. Elisa Bray for The Jewish Chronicle writes that
Having grown up with the traditional music of his Moroccan-Jewish parents in Beersheba, Avital picked up the mandolin aged eight and was first introduced to classical music at the local youth mandolin orchestra — and not just the likes of Mozart and Chopin, but to folk songs from around the world. He would later study at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, and learn the instrument’s historic repertoire at the Cesare Pollini Conservatory. [...] Avital ... became “hooked” on klezmer and improvisation at 24, with the help of clarinettist and “king of Klezmer” Giora Feidman who took him on tour around Europe playing in his band. “It’s not the kind of music that my Moroccan grandmother listened to,” he laughs. “But that was my link to playing Jewish music.” Later, his Jewish roots resurfaced in his fusion project with bassist Omer Avital, a fellow Moroccan-Jew, on their joint album Avital Meets Avital.
Bray notes that Avi Avital is the first ever mandolinist to win a classical Grammy, and that probably helped him get signed to Deutsche Grammophon.
Obviously, Avital had to record Antonio Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concerto in C major. As much as this one is played, I haven’t grown tired of it.
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The concerto is also quite effective as a sonata for mandolin and guitar. Matthias Collet arranged it as such and accompanied Natalie Korsak on mandolin.
Vivaldi also wrote a Concerto in G major for Two Mandolins, Strings and Continuo, which gets a decent amount of performances. In the performance in this next video, Yaki Reuven and Mari Carmen Simon are accompanied by Barrocade Ensemble in a live recording at the Tel Aviv Museum.
Notice there’s no conductor, presumably the principal first violinist took on all the duties of the conductor other than waving a stick in front of the ensemble. Notice also that the ensemble includes guitar, harp and I’m guessing theorbo.
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Next up, we have a composer who must have known about Vivaldi but probably did not know about Beethoven. As with Franz Krommer slash Kramář, some people insist that Johann Andreas Colizzi should be known as slash Kauchlitz, or Kauchlitz slash Colizzi.
IMSLP actually lists a few more variants of his name of varying degrees of explicability. Wikipedia was little help; the people who thoroughly debated the correct title of the 2013 Star Trek movie could not be bothered to figure out the correct name of an obscure Dutch composer.
The New Grove is far more authoritative, so per that reference I’m settling on Johann Andreas Colizzi. Maybe you disagree with this choice, but I hope you agree with me that his mandolin concerto is very good.
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Giovanni Paisiello was a contemporary of Colizzi’s, don’t know if they knew of each other.
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Beethoven contemporaries E.T.A. Hoffmann and Johann Nepomuk Hummel both wrote mandolin concertos, but neither particularly stands out to me. Or maybe it’s that I didn’t pick the best available recordings of those concertos in the Naxos Music Library. But while I was researching Treemonisha by Scott Joplin, YouTube suggested I might like this video with Avi Avital. And I did, and I now I admit my first impression of Hummel’s concerto was wrong.
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I haven’t reassessed my first impression of Hoffmann’s concerto yet.
This next piece is technically not a mandolin concerto, at least it’s not titled that way. But I liked the music and the video, despite the musicians being way too self-conscious about their facial expressions for the camera.
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Violin maker Antonio Stradivari must have made several mandolins, but only two of them are known to still exist. Raffaele Calace would probably have hesitated to call his father the Stradivarius of the mandolin. Calace also made mandolins, but his fame today is due to his phenomenal technique on the instrument, and several compositions for the instrument, including two concerti.
Encore by Johann Sebastian Bach follows Calace’s Mandolin Concerto No. 2.
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There are a couple other composers I’m aware of but haven’t yet had time to listen to their music.
The open thread question: What is your favorite music with mandolin solos?
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