Philip Glass's Violin Concerto No. 1 was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra for soloist Paul Zukofsky and premiered in New York City on 5 April 1987. The work was composed with Glass's late father in mind. The piece quickly became one of Glass's most popular works. It is usually around 25–30 minutes in duration when performed.
Conception
Following Glass's early operas, the conductorDennis Russell Davies had been urging the composer to write more orchestral pieces, and the concerto marks Glass's first full-scale venture into non-theatrical orchestral composing.
Glass's original concept was for a five-movement work, and Zukofsky requested a slow, high finale. As the composition process developed, however, Glass decided that five movements were too many and settled for a more conventional three-movement format. According to Glass, this traditional structure was not a concession to formality but simply a result of the work finding "a voice of its own" as the first and second movements developed into longer pieces than he had originally conceived. The work was composed with Glass's father, Ben, in mind, despite the latter's death some sixteen years earlier: "I wrote the piece in 1987 thinking, let me write a piece that my father would have liked [...] A very smart nice man who had no education in music whatsoever, but the kind of person who fills up concert halls. [...] It's popular, it's supposed to be — it's for my Dad."
The first movement has two contrasting themes, the first in dotted rhythm and initially hesitant and the second in B major (begun by the cellos), wide-ranging and expressive. These are, in turn, dissected and ornamented by the soloist with formidable virtuosity, using multiple-stopping and harmonics and, notably in the cadenza, the extreme upper register of the violin.
The second movement, Preghiera (Prayer), is a short lyrical interlude in A major, with the orchestra woodwinds and horns given much prominence; it leads right into the concluding Rondo, a colourful and vivacious piece with a contrasting episode in B major and demanding bravura playing, but without the first movement's extreme pyrotechnics (suggesting that it was composed earlier).
Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36, BB 48a was written in the years 1907–1908, but only published in 1959, after the composer's death, as "Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. posth." It was premiered on 30 May 1958 in Basel, Switzerland.
Background
The concerto was dedicated, as was Othmar Schoeck's concerto for the same instrument, to the violinist Stefi Geyer, with whom Bartók was in love. Geyer could not reciprocate Bartók's feelings and rejected the concerto. It was revived after both Bartók and Geyer had died. Geyer's copy of the manuscript was bequeathed to Paul Sacher to be performed by him and Hansheinz Schneeberger. The concerto was later championed by David Oistrakh. Acclaimed recordings include Oistrakh with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting, as well as versions by Maxim Vengerov and György Pauk.
Structure
The composition strays from the path of the traditional concerto, having two rather than three movements:
Andante sostenuto
Allegro giocoso
Far from being an innovation, the two-movement form is the traditional design of the rhapsody: a slow movement followed by a fast one. Bartók had already used this form in 1904 for his first concertante work, the Rhapsody, Op. 1, for piano and orchestra (Mason 1958, 15).
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The orchestra’s season opened in November with violinist Sarah Chang in the BruchFirstViolinConcerto, ... In its February residency at the Kravis, Lidberg’s "Petrichor," set to the Violin Concerto No.
Ten dancers in another studio — from corps members to principals interweaving briskly across ranks — were learning to scuttle and cluster in Lidberg's Petrichor, the choreographer tightening up their patterns to PhilipGlass's "ViolinConcerto No.
