Spohr: Sonatas for Harp & Violin

Album review

The harp is, for sure, not the best-represented instrument in the baroque repertoire. It took a love affair for Louis Spohr to come to write his sonatas for violin and harp: the violin was his instrument, and the harp was the instrument of the young woman he loved, who would become Madame Spohr. The Sonatas Opp. 113, 114 and 115 date, respectively, from the year 1806 – their wedding year – 1811 and 1809 (the opus numbers run in chronological order of publication, not composition). At the time, the harp was changing: from single to double action; and schools were embroiled in something of a fight, in which, the double-action harp developed by Erard in the 1810s prevailed, being more solid and more flexible in terms of tonalities and modulations. Note that the single-action harp, through the use of seven pedals, can sharpen the strings of the same note (so, all the Cs at once, all the Ds at once, etc.) so as to raise all the notes by one semitone. With the double-action harp, the use of the same seven pedals allows one to either move up a semitone, or down a semitone. Here the harpist Masumi Nagasawa plays a single-action harp made in Paris in 1815 by Naderman, and Cecilia Bernardini plays a Mantuan violin by Camillo Camilli from 1743, following a number of techniques written by Spohr himself in his École du violon, with all the specificities of the era, not all of which have survived: and so the resulting sound is nothing less than stunning. © SM/Qobuz