This concerto had a long pre-history before its premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 2000, violinist Philippe Quint asked Lera Auerbach to write a violin concerto. She began the work while in residence at Johannes Brahms’ home in Baden-Baden.

Midway through the score, the project changed direction toward a sonata for violin and piano. Yet the sonata became increasingly orchestral in nature, and it became clear that the material would one day need to return to its original idea: a concerto for violin and orchestra.

The American Youth Symphony’s commission gave the concerto the opportunity to come fully to life. Returning to the orchestral sketches from 2000, Auerbach found that the work now required a full orchestral force, though with the brass section excluded except for four French horns. The concerto was completed in December 2003 at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

• Pre-History The concerto began in 2000 and passed through chamber-music form before returning to orchestra.
• After the End The work opens with apocalyptic orchestral “death-clusters”; what follows happens after the end.
• Life and Death The final movement becomes a fiery rondo, an inescapable circle where end and beginning meet.

The first movement begins with an overwhelming apocalyptic orchestral tutti — “death-clusters.” In a sense, the concerto begins with the end: everything that follows happens after the end. When the solo violin enters, it feels dreamy and unreal against the shock of the orchestral introduction.

The second movement is a grotesque, uncanny scherzo: humorous and frightening, attractive and repulsive, familiar and foreign. It evokes the banality of everyday life seen through a crooked mirror, or perhaps a memory of simplicity lost to catastrophe and war.

The third movement, Andante religioso, is a prayer in the form of a passacaglia based on the E-flat major scale. Despite the promise of the major key, it is deeply tragic: the solo violin struggles against the obsessive inescapability of the orchestral columns.

The fourth movement is a fiery dance of life and death, a rondo whose circle cannot be escaped. End and beginning become one and the same, and the dance of life continues even when one is no longer dancing.