From bad joke to 21st-century classic: the best recordings of Korngold’s Violin Concerto

Erich Korngold was what you might call an early adopter. As a child prodigy in Habsburg Vienna, he’d astonished the world: a schoolboy composing orchestral scores that made Elektra sound tame. Jump ahead three decades, and Korngold, in his fashion, was still ahead of the curve. He was one of the first residents of Toluca Lake, North Hollywood, to buy a television. There wasn’t much to watch in 1947, but (according to Korngold’s biographer Brendan Carroll) Jascha Heifetz would drive over anyway from Beverly Hills, and the two exiles — the former protégé of Gustav Mahler, and the greatest violinist on earth — would sit there glued to the live wrestling.

Heifetz’s motives went beyond an enthusiasm for the leotard-clad exploits of Primo Carnera and ‘Gorgeous George’ Wagner. After a decade writing movie scores (a US visa from Warner Bros had saved the life of the Jewish Korngold and his family after the Anschluss), Korngold had recently completed a new Violin Concerto, and Heifetz was out to exercise his droit de seigneur. He premièred the concerto in February 1947. Then it went to New York, and the critics pounced. ‘More corn than gold’ was the crappy little shot that sank the concerto —somebody, give that man a Pulitzer! — and with it Korngold’s postwar career.

US classical critics enjoy enforcing intellectual conformity, and the line in the late 1940s was that romanticism was out and film composers were trash. Korngold died, broken, in 1957 and the concerto faded from view. Then things start to get interesting. Search on Spotify today and you’ll find around 30 recordings. We’re talking credible violinists, too: Renaud Capuçon, Vilde Frang, Arabella Steinbacher. It’s been on Radio 3’s Building a Library, and while its publisher Schott wouldn’t confirm the rumour that it is now the bestselling title in their hire library, ‘it’s certainly one of the most-performed’.