[1][2][3] The violin concerto was begun, at the suggestion of Serge Koussevitzky, in the summer of 1927—although the composer later postdated the beginning of this work to his years at the American Academy in Rome in 1928 and 1929,[4]—and was completed in 1935.
[5][6] It was originally meant to have been premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra during their 1932–33 season, with Richard Burgin as soloist, but Sessions did not finish the finale—originally to have been the third movement—in time.
[7] Ultimately deciding on a four-movement form, Sessions delivered the violin part to Burgin in the fall of 1934, while still orchestrating the last movement, and Koussevitzky agreed to program the concerto during the first half of the 1935–36 season.
[8] When Sessions expressed a preference for a better-known violinist, Burgin graciously stepped aside and Joseph Szigeti was named as the probable soloist.
[19] The third movement is joined to the finale by a cadenza for the soloist, which employs a sort of metric modulation in which the violin accelerates through a measure of thirty-seconds to a bridge passage of sextuplet thirty-seconds, entering the finale with a passage equivalent in basic pulse though not in speed with the previous movement.