Sviridov

If there is one student of Johann Sebastian Bach whom posterity has definitely not forgotten, it is Johann Gottlieb Goldberg. However, he owes this destiny to his position as harpsichordist to Count Keyserling: during the latter’s bouts of insomnia, it was Goldberg’s task to play for him the famous variations that he had commissioned from the Leipzig Kantor. This has probably long obscured the fact that Goldberg was also an excellent composer. Aside from his only two surviving cantatas (already recorded by Ricercar), his output is essentially instrumental, and the genre of the trio sonata occupies an appreciable place within it. Here are his complete trio sonatas, along with a sonata in C major at one time attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1037).

After devoting an album to sonatas by Giuseppe Tartini, for this anniversary year of the illustrious Paduan virtuoso, Evgeny Sviridov offers us a recording of violin concertos. This is his first collaboration with Millenium Orchestra, the ensemble founded by Leonardo Garcia Alarcon in the framework of CAVEMA in Namur. Most of the concertos selected come from manuscript copies made in eighteenth century Germany, where Tartinis reputation was very high. Evgeny Sviridov has found in these scores cadenzas and ornaments which are very probably in the hand of Johann Georg Pisendel, the great virtuoso violinist of the Dresden court, a friend (and interpreter) of Johann Sebastian Bach! Following a practice that was becoming increasingly common in Germany at that time, one of the concertos has two horn parts in addition to the strings. Of the 130 or so surviving violin concertos, Evgeny Sviridov has selected five.

After devoting a disc to sonatas by Giuseppe Tartini, for this anniversary year of the illustrious Paduan virtuoso, Evgeny Sviridov offers us a recording of violin concertos. This is his first collaboration with Millenium Orchestra, the ensemble founded by Leonardo García Alarcón in the framework of CAVEMA in Namur. Most of the concertos selected come from manuscript copies made in eighteenth-century Germany, where Tartini's reputation was very high. Evgeny Sviridov has found in these scores cadenzas and ornaments which are very probably in the hand of Johann Georg Pisendel, the great virtuoso violinist of the Dresden court, a friend (and interpreter) of Johann Sebastian Bach!

Georgy Sviridov, a leading composer of the late Soviet era in Russia, wrote a good deal of religious music, influenced by the Russian Orthodox legacy and by sacred works. The last years of Soviet rule saw a relaxation of official atheism, and these works earned Sviridov critical acclaim. Indeed, Sviridov greeted the Perestroika era and the impending fall of the Soviet Union with trepidation, and annotator Alexander Belonenko does well to compare the music here to Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil, written in 1915 in a similar period of instability. (The Red Easter, however, refers not to Communism but to texts printed in red in an Orthodox liturgy.) Sviridov's a cappella sacred music has a different effect than Rachmaninov's; he uses less of the sub-bass sounds of the Russian tradition.