Spohr wrote 15 violin concertos, the first completed in 1803 and the last in 1844. The best known of these is probably No. 8, which incorporates an operatic element. Other concertos include two double violin concertos and four concertos for clarinet. The latter are an important and popular part of solo clarinet repertoire and were written for the clarinettist Johann Simon Hermstedt.

Spohr wrote 15 violin concertos, the first completed in 1803 and the last in 1844. The best known of these is probably No. 8, which incorporates an operatic element. Other concertos include two double violin concertos and four concertos for clarinet. The latter are an important and popular part of solo clarinet repertoire and were written for the clarinettist Johann Simon Hermstedt.

The four works on this album, all composed in the 1940s, embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the Duet Concertino and Prelude to Capriccio were works of Richard Strauss’s Indian Summer – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of Appalachian Spring and the Clarinet Concerto, though inescapable, was minimised in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed native folk music and jazz.