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 this collection 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 for reappraisal 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 is alsoincluded here.
