Max Bruch: Violin Concerto in G major

The German composer Max Bruch, born in Cologne, Kingdom of Prussia, in 1838, is part of the group of minor post-romantic musicians, from the second half of the European nineteenth century. It is a time when composers live a kind of forced transition in which they are forced to prolong romantic forms and aesthetics, to please an increasingly vast public formed by an enriched bourgeoisie that does not advocate sophistication.

Bruch's Violin Concerto in G minor, from 1868, is in a certain way part of that aesthetic because in the work we can still appreciate that exacerbation of pyrotechnics and virtuosity that will be later abandoned by the authors to come, putting a definite end to the great romantic century.
Max Bruch composed three violin concertos but the only one that remains to this day as part of the violinists' standard repertoire is Concert N° 1 in G minor. Composed at age 30, it enjoyed enormous acceptance for a long time, to the extent that the author seriously thought about forbidding its performing because it impeded the interpretation of the others. Apparently, the audience today and yesterday were right.

Max Bruch (1838 - 1920)

The concert score also has a story. At the end of World War I, due to the chaotic economic situation, Bruch's editor was not in the position to pay the copyright to this and other works of the composer. Bruch did not like it at all and sent the autograph score to a couple of sisters who were a famous piano duet for whom he had already composed a concerto for piano, in order that they sold the concerto in the United States. Rose and Ottilie Sutro, two pioneering girls in the country of opportunities, sold it on their own and Bruch never got a penny for the transaction. The composer died in Berlin in 1920, not knowing what happened with his popular concerto on his tour through the new world.

Violin Concerto in G major - Finale (allegro energico)
The concerto is in three movements. We offer here the last of them – the one that made the work famous – in the rendition of the extraordinary American violinist Sarah Chang, of whom Yehudi Menuhin pointed out she was "the most wonderful, the most perfect, the most ideal violinist I've heard". Sarah is the daughter of Korean parents but was born in the USA in 1980. At the age of nine, she made her debut in New York accompanied by the New York Philharmonic.

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