Did You Know . . . Brahms Was the Only Famous Composer in the 19th Century to Write a Full-length Double Concerto for Violin and Cello?

By Robert Markow | From the January/February 2026 issue of Strings

Written in 1887, the Double Concerto in A minor, Op. 102, remains by far the most famous concerto of its kind from any period.

Earlier in the century, Gaetano Donizetti and Louis Spohr wrote concert works for this pair of solo instruments, but they are single-movement concertinos lasting just 12 or 13 minutes each. Going back to the 18th century, there is a double concerto by Leopold Hofmann and several by Johann Christian Bach (known as symphonies concertantes, some for two violins and cello), and—almost inevitably, one is tempted to add—by Vivaldi, for either violin and cello, two violins and cello, violin and two cellos, or two of each.

Otherwise, the vast majority of double violin and cello concertos have been written in the 20th and 21st centuries. Music aficionados might recognize the names Frederick Delius, Kurt Atterberg, Ned Rorem, Ivan Tcherepnin, Philip Glass, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich as composers of full-length double concertos, and there are others. In addition, there are numerous concert works that are not concertos per se, but that feature violin and cello: Miklós Rózsa’s Sinfonie concertante (written for Heifetz and Piatigorsky), Ysaÿe’s Poéme nocturne, Saint-Saëns’ La muse et la poète, Vieuxtemps’ Duo brillant, Konrad Boehmer’s Il combattimento, Richard Danielpour’s A Child’s Reliquary, and Daron Aric Hagen’s Masquerade, to name just a few.