Violin Concerto in D minor, op. 47

Sibelius had wanted to be a violin virtuoso and gave the ambition up only after a shoulder injury and a late start; the single concerto he wrote, in 1903–04, carries that history in it. The first performance, in Helsinki on 8 February 1904 with Viktor Nováček, went badly enough that he withdrew the score and cut it substantially. The revised version was introduced in Berlin on 19 October 1905 by Karel Halíř under Richard Strauss and is the one played today. The first movement gives the soloist an extended unaccompanied passage in place of a conventional development.

In the autumn of 1903 Sibelius announced that the concerto would be dedicated to Willy Burmester, a violinist he knew from Kajanus’s orchestra who had since made a virtuoso career in Central Europe. Burmester offered to play the work in Helsinki in November 1904; Sibelius withdrew the score instead, gave the revised version to Halíř and the Berlin Philharmonic, and Burmester, offended, never performed it. The concerto gained ground slowly, the turning point coming in the 1930s with Jascha Heifetz’s recording.