In his 88th year, American composer Elliott Carter (born in 1908) continued the remarkable increase in productivity that characterizes his old age. There is a bit more simplicity in the musical style of this concerto that had been the norm in Carter's music since the 1950s. While Carter's typical music might consist of several simultaneous strands of music moving at separate speeds—with these strands all receiving equal weight—here the focus is usually on the soloist. The music remains complex, modernistic, and atonal, but a reasonably experienced listener can grasp its structure and its texture. Carter wrote the concerto on a commission from violinist Ole Böhn and the San Francisco Symphony, funded by Mrs. Ralph I Dorfman. Böhn and the orchestra, conducted by Herbert Blomstedt, premiered it in May 1990. Bayan Northcott, in his notes to the 1992 recording on Virgin Classics, placed it in the tradition of "lyric" violin concertos, such as Mendelssohn's famous work, since like the Mendelssohn, the violin begins playing from the start. He contrasts this style of concerto to the "symphonic" concerto where the violin "is treated as an obbligato." As in the Mendelssohn-type concertos, the violin plays from the start and exposes all the important material first before handing it off to the orchestra. But viewed from another perspective, this is a highly symphonic-style concerto. Development of material and weightiness of idea are important to the concerto's concept, an argument for the symphonic nature of the music. (Shostakovich's Concerto No. 1, for instance, starts with a violin solo and few would argue that it is not symphonic.) The opening violin lines are, in fact, hidden. Its figurations are echoed by a dense web of similar lines being played all over the orchestra. These actually hide the violin's sound: a live audience can see the soloist playing, but rarely pick out any notes. Perhaps this satisfies Carter's penchant for writing dense music that moves on many layers at once. But at any rate, the first movement (marked Impulsivo) quickly thins out in texture so the violin can take the lead. In general, the violin proposes short ideas that the orchestra picks up in short, cinematic cross cuts. The second movement gives itself entirely to one of Carter's typical multilevel ideas. Here, the violin is pitted against the orchestra as decisively as in any concerto: the movement has two tempo marks, the violin part is marked Angosciato (Anguished), but the orchestra is marked Tranquillo. The soloist plays short, bothered phrases, while the orchestra unrolls in slow waves of sound. The finale, Scherzando, has a dancing part that keeps getting disconnected from the orchestra. After a cadenza, the orchestra plays what sounds like final chords, but the violin still dances on for a few measures, with a few orchestral strings scattering before it in a fade out.

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