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Henriette Bosmans composed her Concertstuk for violin and orchestra in 1934, and it received its premiere on 31 October 1935 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Willem Mengelberg with concertmaster Louis Zimmermann as soloist. During Bosmans's lifetime the work was performed no fewer than eight times by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and it soon travelled further afield: in 1940 it was performed by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra with soloist Ruth Posselt, who took it up again the following year with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, giving the piece genuine international reach at a time when recognition for Dutch composers, let alone women composers, was hard to come by. 

Written in a rich, late-Romantic idiom colored by French influence, the Concertstuk showcases Bosmans's gift for lyrical, atmospheric writing and her deep understanding of the violin, developed through her own career as a celebrated pianist and chamber musician. Its single-movement, concert-piece format packs a full range of mood and color into a compact span, moving fluidly between songful lyricism and more dramatic, virtuosic passages for the soloist. Long neglected after the war and only rediscovered decades later, the work stands today as one of the most compelling orchestral scores by a Dutch composer of the interwar period, and this score and set of parts offers orchestras and violinists a striking opportunity to bring a beautifully crafted and genuinely rare piece of early twentieth-century repertoire back to the stage.