Will America’s Mid-Century Concertos Finally Get Their Due?

By Brian Wise | From the September/October 2025 issue of Strings

As a number of orchestras plan to honor the United States’ 250th anniversary next July 4th, the occasion has focused string players’ minds on the American concerto repertoire. For violinists, the go-to choice from the standard repertoire has long been Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, which Albert Spalding premiered in 1941 and which stands alongside Barber’s far-lesser-known Cello Concerto.

But Barber was hardly alone in an era that produced a crop of master symphonists writing gutsy, lyrical, and expansive violin concertos, including those by Roy Harris, Walter Piston, William Schuman, Roger Sessions, and Gian Carlo Menotti. These works were introduced by major orchestras with leading soloists, such as Isaac Stern, Joseph Fuchs, Louis Krasner, and Efrem Zimbalist.

But the second half of the 20th century was less kind to many of these concertos. Academic serialism, Cold War politics, shifting tastes, and some early promotional stumbles prevented them from securing a foothold in the repertoire. A scan of Bachtrack, the concert listings database, reveals that several mid-century symphonists, including Piston and Schuman, are altogether absent from current schedules.

In 2016, Aspen Music Festival CEO Alan Fletcher sounded a rallying cry for mid-century Americans, writing in the Guardian, “Have US musicians and presenters un-justly ignored their own symphonists, or have audiences voted against them?” Since then, the music of Florence Price, including her Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, has made a much-welcomed comeback. And a few determined soloists have stepped forward to champion the likes of Harris, Piston, and Menotti.  

Roy Harris & William Schuman

Consider Roy Harris’ Violin Concerto, a work that had perhaps the rockiest launch of all the mid-century concertos. Harris completed it in 1949 for George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra and its concertmaster, Joseph Gingold, but two attempts at a premiere were cancelled after the orchestral parts arrived filled with mistakes or discrepancies. The concerto was shelved until 1984, when violinist Gregory Fulkerson revived it and then recorded it with the Louisville Orchestra. Few other violinists took up its mantle until 2016, when Tamsin Walley-Cohen recorded the concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Litton. At that point, critics and curious listeners gave it a more enthusiastic reception.

“There’s a lot of modernity and sort of a jazz influence that feels so quintessentially American,” says Walley-Cohen when asked about the music’s strengths. “There are particular harmonies where the chords are spread throughout the orchestra and the orchestration sounds like the big open plains. The melodic writing often feels improvisatory, like I’m making it up as I’m going along. But I also need to be able to spin long lines through it and have a sense of narrative.”

The American West looms over the four sections of Harris’ concerto, appropriate for a composer born in a log cabin in the Oklahoma Territory and who worked his way through the University of California by driving a dairy truck. As with Piston, Copland, and Virgil Thomson, Harris perfected his craft under the watchful eye of Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Walley-Cohen, the daughter of an American mother and British father, admires Harris’ fluency with sul ponticello, left-hand pizzicati, harmonics, and other techniques.

“You could tell he understood how the violin worked, using the open strings, and when he changes tonality really fast, he’s working with and against the natural tonality of the instrument,” she says. “That makes it a real pleasure in a tactile way as a violinist. Also, he really leans into the lyricism of the violin.”

Another piece that experienced a difficult rollout was the Violin Concerto of Harris’ student, William Schuman. The Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned it in 1946 for an expected premiere by Samuel Dushkin. But Dushkin had difficulty mastering the piece, and the gig eventually went to Isaac Stern, who gave the premiere in 1950. Further revisions followed, and Roman Totenberg reintroduced it in 1959, by which time the 30-minute score had a spiky, intensely volatile character akin to Berg’s Violin Concerto.

But there is an American stamp, too, in the concerto’s jazzy passages and evident nods to the “Maria” motif from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. (Schuman served as the president of the Juilliard School and Lincoln Center, but it’s unclear if he consciously quoted his fellow Manhattanite.) In 2001, Philippe Quint recorded the piece with conductor José Serebrier and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, in a tradition of British and European orchestras taking up American concertos.

Piston’s American Optimism to Menotti’s Romanticism

Just as Schuman was sometimes pegged as a corporate suit because of his career as an administrator, Piston struggled to shed a professorial image as a Harvard academic who wrote influential books on music theory. Copland, damning him with faint praise, called the pipe-smoking Piston “one of the most expert craftsmen American music can boast.” But Piston’s roots were as a dance-band violinist, and his three violin concertos have a soulful elegance that reflect his knowledge of the instrument.

The First Violin Concerto is “optimistic sounding and sunny,” says the violinist Miranda Cuckson, who recorded it in 2010 with conductor Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra. “It’s written wonderfully for the violin, which rings out brightly and soars,” she says. “Piston literally wrote the book on orchestration, and whenever I think about this piece and remember playing it with the orchestra, I hear those distinct instrumental colors and also the lovely melodies and the piece’s jaunty pulse.”

Premiered by the violinist Ruth Posselt at Carnegie Hall, Piston’s concerto melds an American aesthetic with European techniques. “Of those pieces of that era that were aiming to create an American ‘classical’ music, this concerto is a very successful fusion of European compositional craft with fresh American energy, pulse, and optimism,” Cuckson adds in an email. “It’s so elegantly crafted and flowing.”

While Piston’s language grew more angular during the 1950s, Gian Carlo Menotti was the poster child for a defiantly Romantic approach. His Violin Concerto, which Efrem Zimbalist and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered in 1952, is “a fresh and vigorous piece of music,” wrote the New York Telegram and Sun, “overflowing with energy and melody and whatever else it takes to complete a three-movement concerto without becoming apologetic.” The lyrical and unpretentious piece has periodically resurfaced, notably in the hands of Jennifer Koh, who recorded it in 2001 with Richard Hickox and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra.

Outside the Homogeneous Circle

The Roosevelt-era composers were a cohesive group, with Copland as their chief evangelist and the symphony orchestra as their supreme medium (Harris wrote some 13 symphonies, Schuman completed ten). But theirs was a homogeneous orbit, exclusive of women and African American composers. Florence Price, despite a large orchestral catalog, struggled to be heard in her lifetime. Another Black symphonist, William Grant Still, composed a beguiling Suite for Violin and Piano for the violinist Louis Kaufman, but never wrote a violin concerto.

Composers with non-Western leanings also traveled a difficult path. The music of Alan Hovhaness, including his Violin Concerto No. 2, is the focus of a new recording by the Boston violinist Zina Schiff. The Massachusetts-born Hovhaness was a true maverick, exploring his Armenian heritage while picking up Eastern and Southern Asian influences and aleatoric techniques. The seven-movement concerto includes raga-like melismas, unmeasured passages, and odd-numbered patterns.

“It’s something that really appealed to me because it’s very improvisatory,” says Schiff. “He doesn’t put very many road signs in terms of dynamics or even some tempi. So, there’s a lot left to the artist to use their imagination. It’s very refreshing, but it is a challenge. And he has these passages that are sort of ‘do your own thing.’ To program this, you must have somebody who’s willing to take that risk.”

Schiff notes how Hovhaness’ fortunes fluctuated over his lengthy career (he died in 2000). After his outsider works took knocks from Copland and Bernstein, he was later championed by conductors Andre Kostelanetz and Gerard Schwarz. “He was on the periphery, and he wasn’t fashionable in any sense, because he was so eclectic. At that time, if you were going to program a modern piece, it had better be dissonant and squirmy for people rather than interesting,” she says.

Schiff points to a period in the 1970s when Barber’s Violin Concerto also fell off performers’ radars. “It would be hard to name more than one violinist who really did it on a regular basis,” she asserts. But by the 1980s, tastes were changing and new versions were flooding recording catalogs. Could the concertos of Harris, Piston, Schuman, and Hovhannes meet a similar turnaround? At least in scholarly circles, there is a growing recognition that the mid-century Americans were simply unlucky enough to peak in an age of peak conformism, when the international postwar avant-garde held sway in modern music.

Walley-Cohen believes there’s a practical element at work too. “The great thing about the Barber [concerto] is that it’s very audience and player friendly,” she notes. “I wonder about the other concertos. With the Harris, there are loads of time signature changes, and it’s difficult for everyone [to learn]. Often, the concertos that get played a lot have a certain practicality about them.” She adds, with a chuckle, “Any American programmers who would like to play the Harris again can come and talk to me. I’ve actually not played it in the States—which is crazy.”