Viola Concerto in C minor

The viola concerto in C minor entered the repertoire in the 1920s and was taken up immediately, for a simple reason: before Berlioz there is almost nothing for the instrument on this scale. Conservatoires adopted it, it became an audition piece, and generations of players learned their concerto form on its long-breathed slow movement and its driving finale. It is still among the first orchestral works a violist is given.

It is a twentieth-century fabrication. Henri Casadesus, viola player and founder of the Société des Instruments Anciens, published it as a rediscovered work by Johann Christian Bach; he had written it himself, as he did with pieces issued under the names of Handel and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The attribution has since been withdrawn and the concerto is now usually billed as Casadesus after J. C. Bach, but it is catalogued and programmed here under the name it has carried for a century.