Spohr Reisesonate Œuvres Pour Violon Et Piano Parrino Fedrigotti - Str33933 - Stradivarius

Founder of the German violin school and author of an authoritative method – the Violin School, published in 1832 –, Louis Spohr (Brunswick 1784 - Kassel 1859), was a prominent artist in the Germany after the Congress of Vienna, admired (mutual admiration) by Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin. Today we remember him above all for his substantial chamber production, which includes four splendid Double Concertos for strings. Spohr, however, also wrote theatrical works like Faust (1813), which together with Hoffmann’s Undine is one of the first significant examples of German romantic theatre, leading to the masterpieces of Carl Maria von Weber. He conducted the Frankfurt Opera from ’17 to ’22 and he did so as a pioneer in orchestral conducting in the modern sense (like Weber, he used the baton and not a rolledup sheet of music or the violin bow). [...] A violinist who left his mark on his era (but for Brahms he would be “the last of the Classics”), Spohr came into contact with Niccolò Paganini (in Venice in 1816), who stated, according to ”Allgemeine Musikalisce Zeitung”, that he was “the first and most excellent cantante on this instrument”. The description cantante is absolutely right, to judge from the full cantabilità, elegant but complete and very varied that must have been a strong point of the instrumentalist. This is emphasised by newspaper reviews: Spohr surpasses Paganini “regarding the cantabile and above all the solemnity of the inflection” (also from the “Allgemeine”). In any case, it is remarkable and fluent melodic inventiveness which characterises Spohr’s work, very marked right from the first pieces and particularly important in the only one of the seventeen Concertos for violin remaining in the repertory, although discontinuously, Op. 47 in A minor In Form einer Gesangszene (1816). Here Spohr the theatrical composer and director at Frankfurt combines cantabilità and opera modules in a pure instrumental form.