Let's just say that Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto is not the best-known on the planet. When I polled our die-hard violin lovers here on Violinist.com, 60 percent of our responders had never heard the Britten, and of the 40 percent who had, most had heard a recording. Only a handful – 5 percent – had heard the piece played live. - Mitchell Tsai from Bookmarklet

Britten's Violin Concerto is no romp through a sunny field of daisies, but it's also not a wasteland of puzzling sound. It is certainly tonal, maybe like a sad and moody Korngold concerto, with touches of Shostakovich-like elegy. Of course the piece can't be considered derivative of either of those concerti; the Britten was written in 1939; the Korngold in 1945; the Shostakovich in 1947-1948. But they share a certain language of their time – no easy time, at that. It's the kind of idealism that emerges from a broken world, the flower that blooms in a burned-out battlefield. - Mitchell Tsai