After the beautiful legendary piano concerto from Beethoven, we approach Paganini and his concerto for violin and orchestra. The piece you can listen to here is the last movement of his violin concerto no.2 in Bm (Rondo) which is famous as “La Campanella”. La Campanella in Italian means “the little bell” The reason of this piece’s fame to the little bell is that as you shall hear in the piece in some bars the harmony is accompanied by the ringing of a lithe handy bell which reveals the harmony is reinforced by the ringing of this bell.
Paganini composed six violin concertos the most famous of which is La Campanella. In this movement you can feel his traces in the beginning by use of little notes and large intervals, kept all during the piece and in the end beautiful application of pitsicato (a technique in violin, which the note is played by the slight vibration of the strings by the tip of the fingernails instead of using the bow).
The orchestral parts of his concertos are soft and simple free of instrumental complicatedness, by the way full of variations in the harmonic sentences. In his public performances, he kept the solo part, secret till the last seconds, rehearsing the orchestra even without the solo accompaniment. In his time, only two concertos of his were published. His heirs, kept the rest secret, publishing them only in proper intervals of time. The orchestral parts of his last two concertos are lost and the last movement of his last is composed by an unknown author.
This performance of the second concerto is done by the orchestra of Geneva, Paganini’s hometown, by Massimo Quarta’s solo accompaniment and Paganini’s own violin. It would be interesting to know that Paganini used to play this violin all life , which is now kept in his hometown . Every year a great classic violin player will find the honor to play the master’s violin.
A picture of “The Cannone”:

Dear Lord has already written about Paganini which you can read about following this link.
And, this is the last movement of La Campanella.