Note to moderator: Please read the answerline for the second part carefully. Early pieces in this genre, such as one by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, were often written in D major to accommodate its featured instrument’s “Viennese tuning.” For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this genre that also includes two pieces by Giovanni Bottesini, its instrument’s “Paganini,” as well as an F-sharp minor piece by Serge Koussevitzky.
ANSWER: double bass concerto (18th-century Viennese basses were tuned “F, A, D, F-sharp, A.”)
[10h] Description acceptable. In Dittersdorf’s concerto, the soloist once used this modification to project more over the orchestra. Paganini also used this specific modification in the solo part of his first violin concerto, whose orchestral parts have now been rewritten to avoid it.
ANSWER: retuning up a half step [accept semitone in place of “half step”; accept descriptions indicating that the soloist retuned their instrument a half step higher than the orchestra; accept retuning in E-flat and playing in “D”; prompt on scordatura or answers that indicate intentionally tuning differently than usual by asking “what did the soloist retune to?”; prompt on answers indicating that the soloist’s part is written a half step lower than the orchestral parts by asking “what did the soloist need to do to sound at the same pitch as the orchestra?”]
[10e] This quartet partner of Dittersdorf also wrote a D major bass concerto, but all but two bars of it have been lost. He also included a bass solo in a symphony that convinced the Esterházy court to let its musicians return home.
ANSWER: Franz Joseph Haydn
<Vedul Palavajjhala, Classical Music and Opera>