the exclusive rights to the concerto for two years, but as he could not travel to Britain he waived them to allow the work to be given there. In November 1941, at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Walton conducted the first British performance, with the soloist Henry Holst, former leader of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, who had settled in England. Walton later revised the orchestration, in particular reducing the number of percussion instruments. This revised version was first performed on 17 January 1944, in Wolverhampton, by Holst and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Musical structure The concerto takes about thirty minutes in performance. The revised version is scored for violin solo; 2 flutes (second doubling piccolo); 2 oboes (second doubling cor anglais); 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets in B-flat; 3 trombones; timpani; 2 percussion (side drum; cymbals; tambourine; xylophone); harp and strings. The original instrumentation also included bass drum, castanets, glockenspiel and gong. 1. Andante tranquillo: As in Walton's earlier Viola Concerto, the first movement is the slowest of the three. It is predominantly lyrical and in an unambiguous B minor. The solo violin launches straight into the main theme after a brief rhymical orchestral opening which pervades the whole movement. The movement is not in strict sonata form but does not depart markedly from it, and the second subject is a quiet and flowing melody for strings and woodwind. The opening theme, marked "sognando" – dreamily – is developed in a variety of moods (the analyst Christopher Palmer calls them "an extraordinary number of personality changes") before a written cadenza, and a concluding recapitulation of the opening melody, with brief reappearances of the secondary theme. 2. Presto capriccioso alla napolitana: The second movement is the concerto's scherzo and trio. Unlike the first movement, its key is not clear from the outset, and remains ambiguous in the fast-moving sections. The opening presto requires extreme virtuosity from the soloist – Palmer points to harmonics followed by pizzicati in a fast-moving two-in-a-bar). The intermittent tarantella rhythm gives way to a subsidiary waltz-like theme. The first section eases into the trio, a canzonetta introduced by a solo horn. The analyst Frank Howes notes that Walton disliked identical repetitions of a theme, and at each reappearance the gentle theme of the canzonetta starts on different beats of the bar, changing the rhymical emphasis