Best violin concerto ever? Has to be in everybody's top 5 anyway. Great chamber stuff: string quartets a piano sextet and a string octet. How the hell do you write a string octet anyway? I don't think anybody else ever attempted it.
One of the greatest.
Best violin concerto ever?
Hmmm. Yeah, maybe, since Beethoven's violin concerto, like all Beethoven's concertos, seems to me like something by a symphonist who has no feeling for how to write concertos, but is such a genius that it comes out a supreme masterpiece anyway. So setting aside Beethoven, maybe we can say Mendelssohn's forms a trinity with Brahms' and Tchaikovksy's?
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There are more octets in the canon, one of my favourites being the one in F by Niels Gade. I have that on a CD with the Mendelssohn one, and they make a good pairing.
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