Violin Concerto in D major, op. 35

Korngold finished the Violin Concerto in 1945, in Los Angeles, after two decades of writing for Warner Brothers. He had been a prodigy in Vienna — Mahler heard him at nine and called him a genius — and the concerto is addressed back to that city, to a manner of writing that the war had made unfashionable and, in Vienna itself, impossible. He dedicated it to Alma Mahler-Werfel.

Four of its themes come from his film scores. Korngold never hid this and saw no reason to; the music had been written properly the first time. Jascha Heifetz gave the premiere in St Louis in February 1947 and made the piece his own, though the critics were cooler — one of them produced the line about more corn than gold, which followed the concerto for thirty years and has since been quietly dropped.

What the concerto does not do is apologise. It is unembarrassed about melody at a moment when melody was under suspicion, and it has outlasted most of what was fashionable instead.

The concerto was written at the suggestion of another émigré, the violinist Bronisław Huberman, and Korngold took it up only once the war was over: he had vowed to compose nothing but film music until Hitler was defeated. The four borrowed themes come from Another Dawn (1937), Juarez (1939), Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Prince and the Pauper (1937). Heifetz played the premiere on 15 February 1947 with the St Louis Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Golschmann, and on 30 March took the concerto to Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic under Efrem Kurtz, in a concert that was broadcast and recorded.