Brahms - Clarinet Concerto is the main one for me. His late chamber music for the instrument is magnificent, and a concerto would have been amazing.

 

Absolutely. I can imagine this being a beautiful concerto, but on the quicker side in terms of duration and the instrumentation more sparse. It would be airer in texture almost like a proto-Neoclassical work.

 

I wish Britten could have written more concert music. A few more symphonies and concertos would have been greatly appreciated.

 

As string quintets are my favourite chamber music genre alongside the string quartet, and as Sibelius only composed one mature chamber music piece… And as even Bruckner the symphonist did great job with a quintet… I wish Sibelius would have composed a late string quintet. Now that would have been something!

 

I think stuff for equal voices from Mozart would have been interesting. Die Zauberflöte has a few ensembles like that, but doesn't constitute a whole category of music of the sort. His colleague Haydn on the other hand, has a bunch; Latin and German Catholic music for soprano and alto voices (eg. MH109, 257, 294/300, 548, 602, 837), and lieder for tenor and bass voices. When you're in the right mood for them, the sense of longing and ethereal quality can be captivating, (which for some reason, I like to do when I'm driving through an unfamiliar part of my city).

 

Organ works by Bruckner of symphonic dimension.
Reubke should have lived for many decades to develop his organ sonata writing.
An opera by Bach.

 

Could Beethoven have composed a Cello Concerto? Wouldn't it have been great? I guess. Maybe. Not everything that Beethoven composed was wonderful. Did he even want to compose a Cello Concerto? He certainly could have composed a Cello Concerto if he wanted to do it. As it says in the OP, Beethoven composed five Sonatas for Cello and Piano, but he also did the fun and vibrant Triple Concerto for piano, violin, and cello; which I'd take any day over the mystery Beethoven Cello Concerto that may be hiding behind "Curtain #1". Likewise I'd certainly keep the even better, and more masterful, Brahms Double Concerto and the two achingly beautiful Brahms Sonatas for Cello and Piano, over the imaginary Brahms Cello Concerto that lurks behind "Curtain #2".

Maybe it is fate or destiny that the world's greatest cello concertos would belong to a less popular composer such as Dvorak, and not to a superstar like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky.

And since the high and the mighty couldn't find the time or inspiration to compose that mystery cello concerto that we might wonder about, isn't it great that Dvorak made up for it with his own monumental Cello Concerto, arguably the finest in the genre? And now that I think of it, almost all the great cello concertos belong to composers outside the realm of the ones who think of as the "superstars"; not to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky; but to Dvorak, Elgar, Shoatakovich, Barber, and Britten (if you count the beautiful Cello Symphony that Britten wrote for Rostropovich as a cello concerto). But Wait! There's also Kabalevsky, Myaskovsky, Hovhaness, and John Williams of Star Wars fame, whose Cello Concerto that he composed for Yo-Yo Ma, is very solid and well-crafted, even if not exactly a masterpiece. And would you really want to trade it all, for the mystery Cello Concerto by Tchaikovsky that may be waiting behind "Curtain #3"?

As for a Brahms' Clarinet Concerto, I'd say that Mozart pretty much ruined it for almost everyone with his utterly serene and lovely Clarinet Concerto; far and away the ideal. Carl Maria von Weber left us with two Clarinet Concertos that I find to be mildly entertaining. Carl Nielsen also composed an ambitious and interesting enough Clarinet Concerto that is to be admired at least for the effort. Then the likes of Stravinsky (with Ebony Concerto); Aaron Copland (with Clarinet Concerto); Leonard Bernstein (with Prelude, Fugue and Riffs); and Morton Gould (with Derivations for Clarinet and Jazz Band); composed some wildly fun and entertaining jazz-inspired music for clarinet and orchestra (Copland's is the most masterful); but that's about it.

 

Great question!
Well i wouldn't mind a 2nd Schumann piano concerto
But really i think those would be great:

Beethoven cello concerto or Another string quintet (i felt physical pain when i learned that he actually started writing one after his late quartets but couldn't finish it, just imagine!).
Any Schubert concerto

I also want to add that when i first read the post i thought of stuff that actually did happen lol (e.g dvorak/Schumann - violin/cello concertos).

 

I think I would have loved it if Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms had created concertos for lute and/or guitar. I love their sound, and I miss some famous concertos for them prior to the 20th century. I also wish that Beethoven had used more the harp, perhaps in one or more of his symphonies, as his sensibility with the instrument seems evident to me in the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus.

By the way, I wanted more ballets from the Classical era! Why do we go from the Baroque of Lully and Rameau directly to the "classical" ballet of Adam's Giselle in terms of what is mainstream in the genre? Mozart alone composed so much dance music. I wish he had composed more ballets (he has only one if I recall well).

 

By the way, I wanted more ballets from the Classical era! Why do we go from the Baroque of Lully and Rameau directly to the "classical" ballet of Adam's Giselle in terms of what is mainstream in the genre?

Btw, you could also try Haydn's Der Traum (1767).

 

Schumann wrote 2 pretty good "Concert pieces" that are strangely neglected, maybe because they are probably as much work rehearsing with orchestra as a full concerto but only 15 min long, a fate shared by a few other pieces not quite of cull concerto length by Weber, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Strauss and others...

 

I seem to remember reading Carl Nielsen had planned to write a concerto for each of the instruments of the wind quintet. We got the flute and clarinet concertos, but having the oboe, horn, and bassoon would have been interesting.

 

I would have loved to have heard these works, too. Some kind of double or triple concerto would’ve been interesting as well.

 

When Wagner was young, he completed only a symphony, very influenced by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, before turning to the operatic repertoire as a natural field of composition. I would have loved a symphony by Wagner after the composer had consolidated his peculiar mature style.

 

I would have loved a violin concerto from Schubert. Schubert, especially in slow movements composed beautiful melodies with long lines and I think the violin is perfectly suited to his style, maybe more than any composer. Does anyone have any information about why Schubert didn’t compose a concerto for any instrument? Is it because he couldn’t find a dedicatee or because he just had no interest in it?

 

Agree, though strictly speaking, there are the early, concertante works D345, 438, 580 for violin and orchestra.

Some other, interesting stuff would have been -

• a piano concerto by Scelsi;
• a viola concerto by Shostakovich
• a flute concerto by Debussy
• a harpsichord concerto by Stravinsky ...
• a series of concertos by Webern ...

 

There is a short earlyish violin concert movement/piece by Schubert. Otherwise the closest to a concerto is the Trout quintet and Liszt's later orchestration of the Wandererfantasie as a quasi-concerto. (As people seem to orchestrate everything today, maybe someone has also done the violin fantasy D 934)

 

A few more symphonies and concertos from Tchaikovsky as well as from the Russian Mighty Five and no operas would have been great.

I do wish Rimsky-Korsakov had concentrated his efforts on symphonies and possibly concertos instead of writing a whole bunch of operas.

 

Schubert Piano Concerto would be my vote

 

I would have loved a symphony by Wagner

This. I don't know that I would necessarily have loved it, but I would definitely have paid attention to it; I'm not an opera fan, but have heard enough bits to suggest he would have created something worth listening to.

 

A series of string quartets by Mahler, which could have served as a shadow cycle for the symphonies. I still harbour a far-fetched hope that Mahler secretly composed about ten quartets which still remain undiscovered.

 

Bach.... more concertos, fewer cantatas.

 

Brahms - Clarinet Concerto is the main one for me. His late chamber music for the instrument is magnificent, and a concerto would have been amazing.

I have got the Brahms Clarinet Concerto on CD with soloist Michael Collins*

*Not Michael Collins the Apollo 11 astronaut or Michael Collins the Irish nationalist or even Michael Collins I used to work with, but Michael Collins the British clarinetist. 😄

 

I have got the Brahms Clarinet Concerto on CD with soloist Michael Collins

No, that is Berio's 'rendering' of the first clarinet sonata by Brahms.

 

• Organ music by Bruckner. He was a brilliant organist and improvisator, but all we have is a handful of insignificant little pieces.
• Purely orchestral music by Wagner. We have some juvenalia, the Siegfried Idyll and bleeding chunks from the operas. What if he had lived for 10 years more after Parsifal and gave us the orchestral works he promised us?
• Nielsen, concertos for oboe, bassoon and horn. Those were planned but never written.

 

String Trio by Brahms and/or Bartók.

 

I wish Haydn had lived long enough to write more symphonies and string quartets.

 

It would’ve been something to hear a Ligeti or Morton Feldman symphony.

 

Haydn wrote a double bass concerto, but unfortunately it's lost! We have only the first two measures

I would also love to hear solo concertos by Schubert, and also Handel

 

Handel wrote ~15 organ concerti, a harp concerto, at least one oboe concerto (3 under his name but at least one is not by him) one (op.3/3) with flute or oboe as solo etc. Several of them have also be arranged for different instruments which would be in line with common baroque practice. There is also a very nice disc wiht oboist Albrecht Mayer that has about 4 "concerti" put together from Handel arias/movements.

 

I'm not sure about a favorite instrument example, but I've always wondered what a fourth Tchaikovsky ballet would've been like. I think I remember reading that in a letter he mentioned working on a ballet Cinderella. Seems like the perfect subject (even if we did eventually get Prokofiev's interpretation), and I have to think that given how popular Tchaikovsky's three ballets are, that a hypothetical Cinderella would've been just as good.