‘Prawn cocktail is back!’ – or so claims queen of cookery, Mary Berry. How such a tasty starter ever came to be viewed as passé will always puzzle this tongue. But its return after a 40-year absence from our dinner tables is a reminder that menus of any kind, be they in restaurants or concert halls, need rediscoveries as well as novelties to cheer the public.

Composers are especially prone to vogue, likely to drop off the menu for many decades before being rediscovered by players whose great-grandparents were their most recent relatives to hear the music. Gramophone magazine would be a lot slimmer without its monthly treasure trove of works by ‘unjustly neglected masters’. Playing styles too, especially for us string players, come in and out of fashion. Historical performance practice experts are now as essential to orchestras as costume experts to period drama wardrobes; witness how portamentos that delighted audiences in the 1920s – and sickened those in the 1970s – are now enjoying a comeback.

Composers and playing styles are not the only fashion victims; compositional forms also come and go. Though some forms prove especially resilient to mode – the concerto, for instance, hasn’t left the concert programme in centuries – others are much more susceptible, and none more so than the Fantasy, or Fantasia.

The very term Fantasy hints at a fragile claim on concert status, relying as it does on the quasi-spontaneous imagination of the performer/composer, not so much a composition as an improvisation. An early description comes from Thomas Morley (1597) as ‘when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit.’ When the vogue is for more academic art forms, fantasies suffer. Even Walter Cobbett, the musical philanthropist who famously sought to resurrect ‘Phantasy’ form as chamber music at the beginning of the 20th century, conceded it was ‘not of the academic type’.

Fantasies come in many different species, one of which, the operatic fantasy – a virtuoso display piece on operatic themes for instrumentalist – proved especially ephemeral. When they were in vogue they were everywhere; mid-19th century concerts seldom lacked an operatic fantasy or three, vehicles for visiting virtuosi to bewitch audiences with cantabile lines and technical wizardry in turn. Universal popularity was guaranteed because the tunes at their heart – arias from the bel canto operas of the day – were Top of the Pops, loved by audiences from every social class, heard not just in the opera house but in the singing of massed choirs, in variety bills, even from hurdy-gurdies and barrel organs in the street.

By the turn of the last century the demand for operatic fantasies was beginning to wane, so much so that by 1913 the celebrated pianist Francesco Berger, writing in his Reminiscences, Impressions and Anecdotes, had to explain the genre to his readership, even to apologise for it: ‘It was the fashion then [1848] for Performers on any Instrument, stringed or wind, to compose their own Solos, and these consisted of extracts from popular Operas worked up into an "Introduction, Air, Variations and a brilliant Finale"; and these "fantasias" they publicly performed with great success. How strange they would sound now! - a fagotto Solo on "Norma", a clarinet Solo on "Lucia de Lammermoor".’

That was over a century ago, and well before the bel canto revival. Surely it’s now high time the operatic fantasy came back onto the Strings menu. IMSLP, the wonderful online repertoire library, is brimming over with this repertoire, from every 19th century violin and cello virtuoso/composer you could name. The pieces delight, as well as dazzle, audiences, whether with piano accompaniment in salons or with orchestral accompaniment in concert halls. They are ideal technical fodder for advanced students, and – here’s a secret – always sound more difficult than they really are.

But the best reason to resurrect the operatic fantasy, for audiences and players alike, is for its cantabile quality. Audiences love a melody, and these works are shot through with arias by Bellini, Donizetti and the like. Players are stepping back into an era of bel canto tone production, being led by the hands of the very string virtuosi who heard and accompanied the finest singing known to any age. Never a main course perhaps, but mouth-watering starters and desserts aplenty.

Adrian Bradbury's latest release ‘Alfredo Piatti: The Operatic Fantasies, Volume Two’ is out on the Meridian label now.

Adrian Bradbury is a British cellist, recognized especially for his contribution to contemporary music (Royal Philharmonic Society chamber award, Composers Ensemble), teaching (Cello Tutor, National Youth Orchestra of GB) and musician science (research published by the Royal Society)