Max Bruch – Violin Concerto in G minor, op.26 (Henle)

Michael Kube (Editor)

Johannes Umbreit (Piano reduction)

Kurt Guntner (Fingering and bowing for Violin)

It made its creator world-famous and added a towering masterpiece to the standard repertoire: Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto in g minor. Now it’s appearing at last in an urtext edition from Henle. Bruch himself was not always overjoyed at his work’s popularity: “I can’t listen to this concerto anymore,” he once complained to his publisher Simrock, “do you suppose I’ve only written one concerto?” By now the Bruch Concerto has found a permanent place in the world’s concert halls. Henle’s edition provides not only a razor-sharp urtext for the solo part, but a preface that alone is worth the price of the volume: who could have guessed that the concerto went through a convoluted genesis with multi-layered revisions, and that some of the changes go back to the famous violinist Joseph Joachim?