About this Piece

Samuel Barber’s death in 1981 at the age of 70 deprived America of one of its most distinguished and successful composers of serious music. In contrast to many of his colleagues who had to “moonlight” in various other musical capacities, he was able to support himself through composing almost from the auspicious start of his career.

In the 1930s, with atonality and the 12-tone technique pressing for consideration, Barber’s traditionalism was welcomed with enthusiasm. In his works were all the comforting qualities valued by the large public, for Barber was in possession of a craftsmanship that extended to all the elements of music: His melodies are natural and expansive; the rhythms varied and vital; the harmonies just pungent enough; and his orchestration, like that of Brahms (the composer in whose steps Barber seems to have followed), does not call attention to itself but is nonetheless distinctive for being perfectly suited to the musical thought at hand. In short, skill, taste, and seriousness inform Barber’s music at every turn.

The last element—seriousness—figures as one of the composer’s most unvarying characteristics. Some people are born middle-aged—that could be said of Barber, as viewed through his music. When he wrote his first piece at age 7 and titled it Sadness, the die was cast. If not sadness, then an elegiac lyricism pervades much of his music. The first two movements of the Violin Concerto are typical of this emotional climate; they revolve in an orbit of pensive, plangent songfulness. Even when this mold is broken for a fast and virtuosic final movement, the music is hardly frivolous; it is still notably serious.

The Violin Concerto was composed in 1939 on a commission from the wealthy businessman Samuel Fels for a talented graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, Iso Briselli. When Briselli asked for revisions (which Barber refused), the public premiere went to Albert Spalding with Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1941.

The first movement is nearly singular in its lyrical approach. The expansive main theme, presented immediately by the violin—an extended melody containing several distinctive rhythmic figures—dominates the movement. In contrast to this long-breathed lyricism, a secondary theme of a simple, folk-like character tries for perkiness and nearly achieves it. The alternation of these two themes, at times in varied tempos and orchestration (in which the piano adds a distinctive color) but with only a minimum of dramatic conflict, fleshes out a movement that emits an aura of Brahmsian reflection and Straussian poignance.

The second movement is even more inward than the first, beginning with the moody first theme in oboe. However, there are some marked tensions along the way and what the composer called a “rhapsodic theme” that bears surprising echoes of Rachmaninoff.

The last movement presents Russianisms of another persuasion—namely, the grotesquerie of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Syncopations and counter rhythms enhance the diabolical atmosphere of the perpetual-motion whirlwinds in which the violin virtuosically participates throughout. In the concluding measures, the violin’s rhythm becomes ever more precipitous (triplet eighths change to sixteenths), and the movement ends in a burst of brilliance.

—Orrin Howard