Kubelík’s star began to wane in the years before World War I. Some felt he had gone off the boil but it was more a question of his public turning to new idols, Elman and Vecsey. In 1915 he retired to take composition seriously, not resuming his concert career until 1920. He toured Britain 20 times from 1900 to 1934 (packing the Royal Albert Hall with 7,000 people in 1926) and the U.S. many times up to 1938 (6,000 heard him at the New York Hippodrome in 1920-21). He commanded a wide range of music and in Central Europe he is remembered as a great musician. He died in Prague on 5 December 1940. The main fruits of Kubelík’s five-year break were his first three Violin Concertos, published in Prague in 1920. Of the eventual series of six, Pavel Šporcl says: ‘They are technically very demanding and musically extremely interesting.’ The First Concerto in C major, which he plays here, is a melodious Late Romantic work, well tailored to a front-line virtuoso’s strengths, and it should not have fallen out of the repertoire. Kubelík emerged from his purdah to première it at the Grosse Musikvereinssaal in Vienna on 29 January 1917, Nedbal conducting the Tonkünstler Orchestra.

Pavel Šporcl's two most recent projects have manifested his remarkable stylistic flexibility. Vivaldi's Four Seasons and the crossover CD Gipsy Way with the Roma cimbalom band Romano Stilo earned the violin virtuoso richly deserved enthusiasticresponses on the part of critics and listeners alike. With this new CD, Šporcl returns to classical music. Well, sort of… When listening to Korngold's violin concerto it becomes obvious that the composer had devoted to film music over a long period, yet it may be the composition's directness and figurativeness that have made it so popular among the world's leading violinists. On the other hand, Richard Strauss's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op. 8, does not appear inconcert programmes and recordings so often.