A great deal of Dmitry Kabalevsky's best-known music is either music written expressly for children to play or music that might appeal directly and immediately to the musical sensibilities of a child—cheery, energetic stuff possessed of square rhythms and an apparently simple lyricism. Some pieces, like the Violin Concerto in C major, Op. 48, of 1948, are both. The Violin Concerto is the first of three instrumental concertos composed by Kabalevsky during the late 1940s and early 1950s and dedicated to the Soviet youth (the others are the Cello Concerto No. 1 and the Piano Concerto No. 3), and was first performed in fall of 1948 by 18-year-old violinist Igor Bezrodny—not exactly a child, certainly, but the piece is not exactly a simple one either. It seems that Kabalevsky had in mind that each of these three concertos would serve as a model of an advanced study piece for young players, something more elegant (and in line with current Soviet musical policy) than the usual stuff student performers hone their skills on. Today the piece is nearly as often played by bona fide virtuosi as by students—a trend started immediately after the piece was premiered by David Oistrakh, who felt it an attractive enough piece to deserve professional-level performance and took the job upon himself—and stands alongside the Khachaturian Violin Concerto of eight years earlier as a memento of those composers who fully embraced the accessible, tuneful Soviet music-making ideal of the 1940s and 1950s.

Kabalevsky's Violin Concerto is in three relatively brief movements. Snappy rhythms, a main theme with a persistent hemiola, and a cantando second theme in G minor make for a compact, cadenza-less sonata-allegro form first movement (Allegro molto e con brio). The Andante cantabile middle movement is in three clear sections; when the "A" music, with its steadily plodding accompaniment and interesting harmonic twists, returns at the end, the soloist abandons the theme to the orchestra and takes up a flowing obbligato instead. Room is found in the rambunctious Vivace giocoso last movement for a short, transparent cadenza.

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