Bartok Violin Concerto 2

Violin virtuoso Gil Shaham's first-ever collaboration with conductor Pierre Boulez is historic music-making of the highest artistic caliber. In the 27-year-old Shaham, Grammy winning maestro Boulez has found a soloist equally able to deliver the goods on the large and musically free Concerto, as well as the gypsy dance inspired Rhapsodies. Both conductor and soloist received a stellar reception when they performed these works live in concert last December.

Though he was not himself a violinist, Béla Bartók managed to compose two incredible violin concertos, the second of which is considered by some to be the most important violin concerto of the 20th century. The first concerto was written for the unrequited love of his youth, violinist Stefi Geyer, who never performed the work publicly and kept hold of the manuscript until her death in 1956. The two-movement work is filled with references to Bartók's relationship with her; the first movement luxuriously romantic and the second a pyrotechnic display of sheer virtuosity. The Second Concerto came about nearly two decades later from a commission.

Anne-Sophie Mutter's Bartók Second is clearly one of the best around. The first movement is a difficult piece to bring off, if only because the beginning is so simple and tuneful compared to later developments. Mutter proves an excellent guide to the music's ongoing development, never losing site of that folk-like opening and always returning to it as if to say, "See, it was there all along!"

Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2, BB 117 was written in 1937–38. During the composer's life, it was known simply as his Violin Concerto. His other violin concerto, Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36, BB 48a, was written in the years 1907–1908, but only published in 1956, after the composer's death, as "Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. posth." Bartók composed the concerto in a difficult stage of his life, when he was filled with serious concerns about the growing strength of fascism. He was of firm anti-fascist opinions, and therefore became the target of various attacks in pre-war Hungary. Bartók initially planned to write a single-movement concerto set of variations, but Zoltán Székely wanted a standard three-movement concerto. In the end, Székely received his three movements, while Bartók received his variations: the second movement is a formal set of variations, and the third movement is a variation on material from the first.