Between 1911 and 1918 in particular he produced a series of works reflective of his Jewish heritage. Bloch was an intensely serious composer, thorough in his craft, and one who felt deeply about his music. In an age of increasing musical atonalism and dissonance, his works mark a more conservative strain in 20th- century music, but that is not to say that he was not adventurous in some of his harmonic writing. Bloch's seriousness is felt immediately in the terseness of the opening movement of the Concerto Grosso, the Prelude. The third-movement Pastorale strikes a lighter note with its reminiscences of Swiss folk dances which Bloch must have recalled from his childhood.
Memory here is distilled into music of great charm and beauty.
And then there is the final movement Fugue - after the fashion of the greatest of all conposers of the fugue, J. S. Bach. Its strong engaging theme, heard at the very outset, is spelled out in turn by the different strings and finally the piano, and there is some masterly contrapuntal thematic interweaving as the movement progresses. All along Bloch has produced a modified version of the old 17th and 18th-century baroque concerto grosso form. It certainly doesn't act as the old harpsichord used to - that is, as merely an accompanying continuo instrument. Bloch actually wrote this work for students and its premiere in 1925 marked the composer's final appearance with the Cleveland Institute of Music.