Concerto for Violin and Orchestra

The two-movement Concerto for violin and orchestra has an interesting creation history. According to the composer, it was written on commission by the German publishing house Peters. Denisov was still young at the time, an admirer of the violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Alban Berg, and found it difficult to imagine that he could write a violin concerto in the first place. Therefore, he suggested to write first a concerto for another instrument. He wrote concertos for violoncello, piano and flute, which were released in print by Peters. Only then did he feel ready to tackle a violin concerto. But while he was at work on the piece, the two publishing houses Edicion Universal (Vienna) and Peters changed their editorial boards. The demand prevailing at the time was for more commercial works and the score of Denisov's Violin Concerto remained unpublished. The concerto was written in 1977 and is dedicated to the violinist Pavel Kogan. It premiered on July 18, 1978 in Milan with soloist Gidon Kremer. Edison Denisov pointed out that his Violin Concerto contained many personal elements. The entire music material of the piece is seemingly directed at the quote from Franz Schubert's cycle of songs Die schöne Müllerin, written on texts by Wilhelm Müller, which Denisov used at the end of his concerto. And although the two movements are contrasting, they are intonationally and thematically uniform, it is essentially the same musical material. The composer stressed that this was his technique, and it was the same approach he had adopted in his piano concerto and in other works (according to Dmitry Shulgin's book A Confession from Edison Denisov).