Violin Concerto No. 3 (Bruch)

Violin Concerto No. 3 (Bruch)

Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 58, was composed in 1891. It was dedicated to his friend (and superior at the Berlin Academy of Music) the violinist/composer Joseph Joachim, who had pursuaded Bruch to expand what had started out as a single movement concert piece into a full violin concerto..

Despite being advocated by Joachim and Pablo de Sarasate, the concerto, which differed from its predecessors in its adherence to traditional classical structures never attained the same prominence as the G minor concerto.

In recent years the concerto has been described as "...a musical unicorn: since it has almost never been played, its existence is for many the stuff only of musicological folklore." One recent set of program notes for a performance of the G minor concerto even denied the existence of the concerto, stating that Bruch had only composed two violin concertos, the G minor concerto and the D minor concerto composed for Sarasate.