Chattanooga Symphony & Opera - West Side Story & The American Groove - Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 77

Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 77

Johannes Brahms

Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 77
Johannes Brahms
(b. May 7, 1833 in Hamburg; d. April 3, 1897 in Vienna)

Rather than treating the solo violin as an athletic protagonist showing off against an accompanying backdrop, Johannes Brahms built his only violin concerto as a colossal, four-dimensional symphonic dialogue. The technical hurdles facing the soloist are notorious—awkward multiple-stops, massive broken chords, and punishing leaps across strings—yet every measure of display serves the larger musical architecture. As the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow famously quipped, it was a concerto written not for, but against the violin—to which virtuoso Bronisław Huberman later countered, and the violin wins!

Brahms composed the piece during his idyllic summer holiday of 1878 at Pörtschach on Lake Wörth in southern Austria, riding the creative crest of his sunny Second Symphony. A pianist himself, Brahms thought in sprawling keyboard hand-stretches rather than natural violin fingerings. He leaned heavily on the counsel of his dearest friend and champion, the virtuoso Joseph Joachim, sending drafts back and forth by mail. Joachim routinely marked passages as unplayable, but Brahms stubborn-mindedly kept many of them intact, insisting that the music demand an audible sense of struggle. When the concerto premiered in Leipzig on New Year’s Day 1879 with Joachim as soloist and Brahms conducting, audiences immediately recognized the noble kinship to Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Op. 61 (also in D Major) while grappling with the work's unusually dense symphonic fabric.

The opening Allegro non troppo unfolds in expansive sonata form. The orchestra lays out the principal themes before the soloist bursts in, not with polite melody, but with a fierce, improvisatory flourish. Throughout the movement, Brahms weaves the violin in and out of the orchestral textures, demanding staggering athleticism without ever surrendering to superficial flash. Wrapping up the massive first movement, Goosby steps forward for the virtuosic cadenza before the orchestra returns to draw the movement into a serene, golden coda.

The Adagio opens with a tender, Austrian folk-like melody entrusted entirely to the solo oboe—a choice that so infuriated the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate that he flatly refused to play the work, complaining he had no intention of standing idly on stage holding his fiddle while the oboe walked away with the only decent tune in the movement. Sarasate missed the point: Brahms turns the soloist from a showman into a poet. When the violin enters, it does not simply repeat the tune, but offers an exquisite, searching meditation floating above luminous woodwinds.

The finale (Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace) sweeps away the reverie, exploding into an earthy, stomping Hungarian dance. It is not merely energetic; it is an overt tribute to Joachim’s Hungarian roots. In the early 1850s, Brahms toured with the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi, who introduced him to the verbunkos (gypsy/military dance) style. The rhythmic drive—snapping accents, stomping syncopations, and gypsy flair, all echoes from Brahms’ youth—acknowledged his lifelong debt to Joachim and gave us a final kinetic thrill all wrapped up together.

Which cadenza did Goosby choose? Not the ubiquitous cadenza by Joseph Joachim nor Fritz Kreisler’s from the early 20th century, but the rare 1960 version by Nathan Milstein. Goosby’s choice carries a distinctive lineage: his longtime mentor, Itzhak Perlman, studied with Dorothy DeLay, who was herself a student of Leopold Auer—the very master who trained Milstein in Saint Petersburg. Milstein approached Brahms not with empty showmanship, but as a structural partner. He extends Brahms’s own musical argument with polyphonic writing, subtle harmonic pacing, and the poised elegance that defined his playing. It stands today as one of the most thoughtful 20th‑century contributions to the concerto’s performance tradition.