Concerto for violin and orchestra

Milan Kundera compared symphonic music to a journey through a world which has no boundaries. And so it is with the solo violin in this work, which seems to be on a journey where it continually encounters new vistas and situations. The last pages of the concerto, containing the furious stretto finale, were written in New York's Manhattan. Returning after two decades of absence to the city in which the composer studied as a young man was a moving experience for him: "As I looked from my workroom window at the sky-scrapers of Downtown Manhattan, with their thousands of lights switching on an off in the windows around the clock, and listened to the endlessly changing murmur of traffic on 5th Avenue, I realised that the violin part should live its final moments passionately and restlessly, untiringly penetrating the orchestral texture right up to the very last bars of the piece."