Carmen Fantasy, Op. 25

Sarasate opens with a brief, dramatic orchestral flourish before the violin enters, immediately signaling that this will be a display piece built on tunes the audience already half-knows from Bizet's opera.

The first big section takes the habanera-like music associated with fate and seduction in the opera and stretches it out, letting the violin slide and swoop in ways a singer's voice never could.

A slower, more songful episode follows, drawn from a moment of tenderness in the opera, giving the soloist a chance to spin a long, singing line before the display resumes.

The middle sections pick up the opera's dance rhythms, including a triple-meter tune associated with the character Carmen's flirtatiousness, tossed off with rapid string-crossing, left-hand pizzicato, and high harmonics.

The final section is built on the opera's famous bullfight tune, taken at a bright tempo and pushed faster toward the close, ending the piece with a rush of double-stops and fast bowing that leaves no doubt the soloist has survived the obstacle course intact.

Sarasate, himself a touring virtuoso violinist, wrote the Carmen Fantasy in 1883, just eight years after the premiere of Bizet's opera Carmen in Paris. Like many traveling soloists of his era, he built his reputation partly on fantasies that reworked popular opera tunes into vehicles for his own technique, and Carmen's melodies, already famous, were an obvious choice. He premiered and toured the piece widely himself, using it as a calling card across Europe and the Americas. It has remained a favorite encore and recital closer ever since, valued less for the opera's story, which the music does not attempt to narrate, than for the sheer technical fireworks it demands of the violinist, including rapid passagework, harmonics, and left-hand pizzicato.