Violin Concerto no. 1 in D major, op. 19

Prokofiev began the First Violin Concerto in 1915 as a concertino and finished it in 1917, but the revolution swept away its scheduled premiere; the first performance took place in Paris on 18 October 1923, with Marcel Darrieux as soloist and Serge Koussevitzky conducting. The Paris audience found it insufficiently modern. Joseph Szigeti took it up shortly afterwards and played it across Europe, which established the piece. It opens and closes quietly, sognando, dreaming, with a savage scherzo between the two slow outer movements.

He worked on the concerto alongside the opera The Gambler, and had difficulty finding anyone to play the solo part: Paul Kochanski was engaged elsewhere, Bronisław Huberman would not look at the score, and Nathan Milstein was still in Russia. Picasso, Anna Pavlova, Karol Szymanowski and Artur Rubinstein were in the audience at the Paris premiere. In the Soviet Union the work also made little impression until the nineteen-year-old Milstein played it with Vladimir Horowitz taking the orchestral part at the piano.