Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor, 3rd mvt

Is there a better-known or better-loved violin concerto than Felix Mendelssohn’s?

Mendelssohn has such amazing facility that it wouldn’t have taxed him to write a violin concerto in six days. It shows just how much care that he took over the concerto that he spent over six years composing it. He wrote the work for Ferdinand David, a friend since boyhood and leader of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, who he consulted frequently about details of the solo violin writing.

Violinist Joseph Joachim, who studied Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the composer and gave more than 200 performances of it said: “The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven’s. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart’s jewel, is Mendelssohn’s.”

This brilliant performance, by violinist Alina Ibragimova, follows hot on the heels of her critically acclaimed performances at the Proms earlier in August of all the Bach Violin Sonatas and Partitas.

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