Spohr: Works for Violin and Piano – Turban, Lessing

Nobody puts Louis Spohr on a pedestal anymore, and that is exactly why this disc matters.

He was, in his day, a colossus — director, violinist, composer of ten symphonies and eighteen violin concertos, inventor (or so he claimed) of the chin rest and the rehearsal letter, a man Wagner and Mendelssohn both revered and occasionally resented. Then the twentieth century happened to him, as it happened to Raff and Moscheles and half a dozen other formidable Biedermeier professionals, and he was quietly filed under Historical Curiosity. What’s left, mostly, are the concertos, kept alive because teachers still assign the Eighth to students who need to learn how to spin a singing line without Paganinian pyrotechnics getting in the way. The chamber music has waited in the wings. It’s still waiting, a little, but Ingolf Turban and Kolja Lessing are making a persuasive case that it shouldn’t.

The Grand duo concertant in E major, op. 112, is the anchor here, half an hour of music that has almost nothing to do with the heroic implications of its title. Forget Beethoven. Forget, too, any lingering Schubertian wanderer lurking in the key relationships — this is domestic music, salon music, written for Spohr and his second wife Marianne Pfeiffer to play together of an evening, and it wears its charm without apology. Turban’s tone is lean rather than lush, which suits it: there’s a Biedermeier wit buried in the piano writing (Lessing’s own booklet note insists on this) that would curdle under too much Romantic slather. You don’t have to catch every wink to enjoy it, but the rendition lets you catch them anyway — a little hesitation before a cadence, a phrase that arrives a hair too politely, as if the music were bowing before it speaks.

The two shorter fillers work almost as palate cleansers. The Adagio in G major, WoO37, barely six minutes long, is pure cantilena — Turban lets the line breathe without dragging it, and Spohr’s fondness for chromatic voice-leading (that famously “creeping” harmonic language his contemporaries either loved or found cloying) gets space to unfold without congestion. The Rondoletto in G major for solo piano is Lessing’s moment alone, brief and unpretentious, tossed off with the kind of light-fingered ease that never announces itself as virtuosity even when it plainly is.

But the real discovery, for me, is the Six Salon Pieces, op. 135, composed 1846–47 — late Spohr, written when he was already something of a living monument, conducting in Kassel, half-forgotten by the avant-garde that had moved on to Liszt and the New German School. The opening “Barcarole” was apparently a drawing-room hit in its time, and you can hear why: the debt to Schumann’s rocking-boat lyricism is audible, but Spohr folds it into his own idiom, all those sinewy, chromatically inflected inner voices that are his fingerprint. The “Sarabande” that follows is sly — deliberately foursquare, almost stiff writing set against flashes of teasing lightness, a joke told with a straight face. And the “Air varié” shows Spohr looking backward, toward Viennese classicism and beyond it to the Baroque gesture the title implies, spinning variations with an elegance that never quite tips into profundity. Whether the whole set holds together as a single sitting is another question. I suspect Spohr himself performed these piecemeal, dipping in for an encore rather than parading all six at once. But taken separately, each has its own small perfume.

Turban’s violin isn’t the sweetest-toned instrument on disc — there’s a slight wiriness up high, a touch of steel where Spalding, in the old Eighth Concerto disc, gave you cream — but it suits this repertoire’s conversational intimacy better than a more upholstered sound would. Lessing, who has made something of a specialty of unearthing this kind of repertoire (his Reger and his Hindemith discs come from the same instinct), plays with scholarly affection rather than showmanship, and the balance between the two players is beautifully judged. This is chamber music of true partnership, not violin-with-piano-accompaniment.

Is Spohr a great composer? No, not in the sense that word gets used for Beethoven or Schumann. But he was a superb craftsman with an unmistakable voice, and this disc, unglamorous as its billing might sound, does what advocacy recordings are supposed to do: it makes you reconsider a name you thought you already knew. Recommended, and warmly.