Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26

Program notes

About the Work

Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto is one of the most beloved works in the entire violin repertoire, and a piece that, to its composer’s lasting irritation, came to overshadow everything else he wrote. Bruch began it as a young man in his early twenties and laboured over it for years; the first version was performed in Koblenz in April 1866, with Otto von Königslöw as soloist, but he was dissatisfied and undertook a thorough revision with the help of the greatest violinist of the age, Joseph Joachim. Joachim advised Bruch on the solo writing and on the work’s unusual form, and the definitive version he premiered in Bremen on 7 January 1868 became an instant and permanent success. Bruch dedicated the concerto to Joachim in gratitude.

That very success became a source of bitterness. Bruch saw little of the money the concerto went on to earn, and, worse in his own estimation, its fame eclipsed the choral and operatic works on which he had staked his reputation. ‘Every fortnight another one comes to me wanting to play the first concerto,’ he complained to his publisher.

The concerto’s most striking formal feature is announced in the title of its first movement: ‘Vorspiel,’ meaning prelude. Bruch worried that calling the piece a concerto at all was misleading, since the opening movement does not follow the expected concerto-sonata pattern. Instead the three movements (Vorspiel: Allegro moderato; Adagio; Finale: Allegro energico) are played without a break, each flowing directly into the next, giving the whole an unbroken, song-like continuity that owes more to Mendelssohn’s concerto than to the grand Beethovenian model.

What to Listen For

The first movement opens not with a flourish but with a question: soft, brooding timpani and woodwind phrases, answered each time by the solo violin in free, almost improvisatory recitative: a true ‘prelude’ that feels like a singer warming up before the aria. From these murmured exchanges the violin launches the movement’s two great themes, passionate and full-throated, before the music dies away and slides, without pause, straight into the slow movement.

The Adagio is the heart of the concerto and the reason so many violinists love it: an outpouring of long-breathed, deeply Romantic melody, three song-like themes layered over one another, that lets the soloist simply sing. Listen for the warmth of the violin’s middle and lower register here; Bruch keeps the orchestra subdued so the line can soar. It is one of the most lyrical slow movements in the literature.

The Finale wakes the music from that reverie. A quiet, expectant build-up in the orchestra sets up the soloist’s entry with a bold, gypsy-flavoured main theme in double-stops: fiery, dance-like and brilliantly virtuosic. Listen for the broad second theme that the orchestra takes up grandly, and for the steadily accelerating drive to the close, the solo line blazing ever higher until the whole concerto ends in a jubilant rush. After the Vorspiel’s questions and the Adagio’s song, the Finale is pure release.