Fantaisies de Concert

Quite early in his career, Pablo De Sarasate produced a series of fantasies on themes from popular operas for solo Violin with Orchestral, or Piano accompaniment.

The appeal of the Carmen fantasy, with which thiscollection opens, has remained the most enduring but, perhaps reflecting the varying fortunes with audiences of the operas themselves, settings of Gounod’s Faust and Roméo et Juliette, or Weber’s Der Freischütz are ready forreappraisal today as similarly exhilarating exercises in Romantic violin technique.

As an example of Sarasate’s equally successful and more purely lyrical “salon” style of composition, his Rêverie, Op.4 isalsoincluded here.