He was impressed with drafts of the score - he felt it to be the first significant violin concerto since Tchaikovsky’s. It’s planned performance was to be by one of the leading soloists of the day, Willy Burmester. The Violin Concerto was written at the time of Sibelius’ move in 1904 from Helsinki to the new lakeside house north of the capital. If you strip away the technicalities from this passage in the first movement of the concerto there is not a lot left in the violin part. In the case of violin concertos that formula for display tends to be mixed up with passages of double or triple stopped notes. Virtuosic passages in concertos for any instrument tend to be built on rapid scale passages or speedy arpeggios - that is, fast stepwise motion up or down or fast motion outlining chords. But if you look at his orchestral work you find many extended passages of harmonic and scalic motion built on the sort of material that tends to feature in a concerto. Some commentators have misleadingly suggested that Sibelius’ style was not well suited to the elements of display expected in a concerto. But in the orchestra there was no substitute for the pedal accommodating enough to avoid the sudden danger of emptiness, and fuse all the different and sometimes incompatible groups of sounds.” Sibelius’ writing for strings in orchestral pieces is often remarkable for the way he creates a soft and shimmering background texture, almost like a piano resonance held in the pedal, that functions brilliantly as a background to woodwind solos in the foreground. While he was writing his scores he sat at the piano, pressing the pedal, and everything sounded perfect. “As a matter of fact, the piano does not interest me ” he commented, “it cannot sing.” His observations on the great pianist composer Liszt are equally interesting: “Liszt is too pianistic in his orchestral scores and too orchestral in his piano pieces. Sibelius did not write especially well for the piano and he lacked much empathy for its sonorities.
Sibelius wrote no piano concertos, in fact the violin work is the only one in that genre although he composed other smaller scale works for solo violin, solo cello and solo voice. The technical knowledge implicit in a virtuosic passage like that one from the Violin Concerto is impressive enough but it is the expressive rather than the flashy dimensions of the writing for violin that are most personal to the composer.
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