I would first of all like to thank Marco Martin for helping me to remember this composer! This is a piece that has stuck with me since I learned about it a year and a half ago in my music history class. It is a Violin Concerto by Alban Berg, with the title “To the Memory of an Angel”.
This piece is said to be dedicated to Manon Gropius, a child that Berg had been close with before she died at the age of 18 from Polio.
This is the second movement, which is much more chaotic than the first. It illustrates the girls difficulty with polio, and then her peace when she moves into heaven. The violin part in this concerto may be one of the most emotional instrumental solo lines I have ever heard.
