Violin Miniatures (Incls 'Humoresque' & 'salut d'amore')

"Guaranteed to bring back many happy memories of the past for those of us who still enjoy the Romantic Age of music"
- Sunday Star (Malaysia)

Violinists owe a great debt to Fritz Kreisler. The coincidence of his career as a violinist with the early demands of the recording industry persuaded him to compose or arrange a series of short pieces, each one of a length to fill one side of a record and equally well suited to the inevitable encores once expected at the end of a violin recital.

Kreisler was born in Vienna in 1875, the son of a doctor who was himself an amateur violinist, and entered the Vienna Conservatory at the age of seven as a pupil of Joseph Hellmesberger, Mahler's successor as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and grandson of a violinist school-fellow of Schubert. He later studied at the Paris Conservatoire as a pupil of Massart, embarking on his playing career from the age of twelve. In 1890 he returned to school in Vienna and began to prepare himself for a career in his father's profession, but after military service he decided to devote himself once again to music. He failed to gain a place in the Vienna Opera Orchestra in 1896, but three years later appeared as soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. From then onwards he continued to win success on the concert platform, his career only interrupted by the war, which he spent in America, after being invalided out of the Austrian army in 1914 after four weeks of campaigning. For ten years Kreisler lived in Berlin, but in 1934 followed other musicians into voluntary exile, at first in France and finally in the United States, where he died in 1962.