This violin concerto has been an audience success since its premiere, remaining tenuously before the public due to its link with one of history's greatest virtuosi of the instrument.

Concert audiences were ahead of the music critics and academics concerning this lovely and expressive violin concerto. While the learned ones who taught and reviewed considered tuneful and tonal music "irrelevant" and largely ignored music that did not fulfill their idea of historical progress in music, numerous composers continued to turn out music with tunes and tonality. "Hollywood music," the pundits might say about a certain strain of tonal music, and in the case of this concerto they would be literally right. Miklós Rózsa (1907 - 1995) was one of the greatest of film composers. Beginning his career working on the fantasy films of Alexander Korda (The Thief of Baghdad, The Jungle Book) he was a pioneer in "film noir" scoring (A Double Life, Naked City) and also the master of the gigantic Biblical epic (Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur). In fact, material from the Violin Concerto was recycled for use in the 1969 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

The Violin Concerto is strongly influenced by Hungarian folk music as introduced into concert music by Zoltán Kodály and (to a lesser extent) Béla Bartók. The best way to characterize its sound is to evoke a more Romanticized version of Zoltán Kodály's Peacock Variations. It is in the familiar three-movement form. The opening Allegro non troppo ma passionato (Fast, not too much so, but passionate) is built on the expected contrasting melodic and dramatic themes, and contains an impressive cadenza. The second movement, Largo cantabile (Slow, singingly) is a song of love and sadness, whose strongly Hungarian flavor allows one to imagine that Rózsa might have had his loss of his homeland in mind. The concluding Allegro vivace (Fast, lively) is a brilliant display for the violin based on themes of rural Hungarian style that runs to a thrilling conclusion.

The concerto was written at the request of Jascha Heifetz, by then a fellow resident of Los Angeles. Rózsa worked on it during the summer of 1953 at Rapallo, Italy. The proximity of their residences permitted Rózsa and Heifetz to make adjustments on the work. (At one point, after Heifetz had handed the composer his Guarnerius violin and had Rózsa demonstrate a "gypsy" effect for the third movement, Rózsa joked the he could now add to his resumé "teacher of Jascha Heifetz.")

Heifetz premiered the concerto on January 15, 1956, with Walter Hendl conducting. Their recording of the concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra by RCA was hugely successful, and for at least a half century never left the catalog, though the idea of competing with Heifetz in one of "his own" concertos impeded subsequent recordings for years. The coming of digital recording broke that impasse, and violinists discovered the richly melodic and virtuosic work just as the concert world became ready to hear such music again.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide