Over recent years, Baroque flute and recorder player, professor of recorder and head of Historical Performance at the Royal College of Music in London, Ashley Solomon and his ensemble Florilegium have recorded flute repertoire on historic instruments from the Spohr Collection. The third volume in this series was released in March 2024.

On the latest album, supported by a grant from Continuo Foundation, Ashley plays on nine original 18th century flutes from Peter Spohr’s private collection (based in Frankfurt/Main) which includes several hundred historical flutes spanning the history of the instrument - including one of the earliest surviving 3-piece French flutes made by Chattillion in c.1680. The album explores repertoire from Italy, Germany and England, and each work matches historically and geographically with the flute Ashley plays.

We can only imagine the excitement, for a historic flautist, of discovering the treasures of Spohr’s collection. Ashley describes the experience:

The collection includes some of the finest examples of playable baroque flutes anywhere in the world, and while many are fragile, extremely delicate and temperamental, there is almost nothing in life as viscerally exciting, as appealing to the intellect and to the senses, as playing on outstanding historical instruments.

All three volumes in the Spohr collection series are available here.