Beethoven’s final version of his Violin Concerto was completed in 1806, and it was first performed in public in December of the same year. This violin concerto reveals close links with the French concertante style, even if filtered through Viotti’s classicism. It is one of Beethoven’s most frequently performed pieces, to the point that it had a very strong influence on the concert repertory of the late Nineteenth century - just to make an example, Brahms’ Violin Concerto seems to have derived many of its essential features from Beethoven’s one.
Mendelssohn most significant contribution to this genre is the Violin Concerto written between 1838 and 1844 for Ferdinand David. Mendelssohn adopts the most recent innovations of this genre, such as the abandoning of the orchestral introduction and the suppression of the traditional division into separate movements, which therefore follow each other without any interruption.
Written during the summer 1878 in Carinzia, Brahms’ Violin Concerto was conceived after the composer’s voyage to Italy, where he stayed in Rome and Naples, a voyage he did in the spring of the same year 1878 together with Billroth and Goldmark. The solo writing of this piece had been for long judged as featuring an extreme complexity, challenging the performer’s possibilities. Brahms means to restore a relation of equality between the orchestra and the soloist, according to a symphonic conception in which the solo instrument is fit into an extremely eloquent and expressive orchestral context.
Even if the piano was one of the most interesting instruments for Tchaikovsky, he also wrote many pieces in concertante style for cello and violin, this last one being the instrument to which he devoted three of his most important works: the Sérénade Mélancolique, the Valse-scherzo and the very famous Violin Concerto in D Op. 35. These three compositions are real challenges to violinists, such is the technical difficulty of these works, representing a summa of all the expressive and technical possibilities of the instrument.
In a performing career that spanned more than six decades, Hungarian- born
violinist Joseph Szigeti established extraordinary new levels of achievement
for the modern violin virtuoso. His flawless technique is well documented in
the many recordings he made (as William Primrose said, “That man’s got more
fingers and more strings than the rest of us!”). Szigeti was also a scholar of
music, a champion of many important 20th-century works for the violin, an astute
observer and critic of the contemporary music world, and above all, an
extraordinary musical interpreter with a passionate concern for the accurate,
authentic presentation of great music.
Isaac Stern was born in Kreminiecz, Russia, and is regarded as one of the leading violinists of the 20th century. He arrived in San Francisco in 1921 with his parents who were fleeing the Russian Revolution. He was educated and raised on the West Coast and began playing the violin early on performing his first recital by the age of 13. In 1936, Stern played for the San Francisco Symphony in a nationally broadcast of the Brahms’s Violin Concerto. This was to be the beginning of a career that has lasted over 50 years.
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