Talk:Violin Concerto (Korngold)

St. Louis Premiere
The phrase "most enthusiastic ovation in...history" sounds like an opinion to me. Ought it be changed? --Hkobb7 (talk) 23:45, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * It ought not be changed just because it is or is believed to be an opinion. Opinions are fine if they can be verified. If the source is not considered reliable, then we need to locate one.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  08:58, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Nonsense. The remark in question is clearly unverifiable, meaningless hyperbole. No one knows what the most enthusiastic ovation was, and one ever will. TheScotch (talk) 15:58, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Huberman: the real story?
This says Huberman unintentionally insulted Korngold by laying the score aside and not being immediately enthusiastic about it, which is why the premiere was then given to Heifetz.

This says that scheduling difficulties were the problem.

So what’s the true story? Did Huberman ever play it at all? --  Jack of Oz   [your turn]  19:45, 29 November 2011 (UTC)


 * According to Michael Steinberg, Huberman never performed the concerto. TheScotch (talk) 15:58, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Large forces?
Re: “Working in the lush, lyrical idiom reminiscent of ‘fin de siècle‘ Vienna, Korngold wrote the violin concerto for unusually large instrumental forces (within the concerto idiom).”

The instrumentation the article goes on to describe—-double woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, one trombone, strings—sounds to me fairly modest, except maybe for the variety of percussion instruments involved. Neither am I aware that concertos typically involve fewer instruments than other orchestral works. What is the source for this remarkable statement? If its author means only that the variety of percussion instruments employed is unusually large, he needs specifically to say so. Otherwise we’re left with the impression that he has no idea what he’s talking about, and the entire article becomes less than credible. TheScotch (talk) 15:58, 1 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I removed the offending passage, although I was tempted to leave it in place, as a warning to Wikipedia readers. Almost everything in this article when I came to it that hadn’t been more or less directly lifted from Michael Steinberg was bovine fecal matter, and that is typical of Wikipedia articles in general. In the end I decided it more important to set the record straight. Clearly warnings about the Internet’s virulent amplification of misinformation are little heeded anyway. I also removed the “lush fin de siecle” bit on the ground that it is unsourced. It may be more or less true—the concerto seems to me to be very much in a late Romantic vein, although I don’t know that Vienna has anything specifically to do with it—but it strikes me as pompously worded, and in any case it’s obviously just someone’s opinion.TheScotch (talk) 16:30, 1 June 2020 (UTC)