Ensemble 415 - Concertos for Four Violins - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Airat Ichmouratov's Concerto Grosso No. 3 subtitled 'Liechtenstein' is a world premiere recording and was composed specifically for Alexander Gilman and the LGT Young Soloists, one of the world's most successful touring youth orchestras. Mahler's arrangement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden string quartet expands it into a grand orchestral spectacle.

Throughout his lifetime, Antonio Vivaldi - a composer of many lyric operas - penned an enormous corpus of works encompassing countless concertos, sonatas, and sacred music. In his concertos and chamber sonatas, Vivaldi reveals his wonderful melodic talent with both deep and elegant allure. The concertos and the sonata of Antonio Vivaldi offered here are seldom performed and recorded. Recorder virtuoso Maria Giovanna Fiorentino leads I Fiori Musicali. Inch(IFM is) of Europe's leading baroque ensembles.Inch (Journées Baroques sur Vienne)

Although the first violin virtuosos came mainly from Cremona, Brescia or Mantua, it was Venice that swiftly emerged as the principal centre for the development of instrumental music. Moreover, it was there that most collections of this music were printed all through the seventeenth century. It is curious to note that all these virtuosos obviously enjoyed sharing their success with their colleagues for, alongside works for one or two violins and continuo, almost all the composer-violinists gathered together on this disc conceived sonate, canzone or sinfonie for ensembles of three or four violins. In addition, these compositions often make use of bichoral or echo effects. All this was happening as part of the discovery of that nascent virtuosity so characteristic of the Baroque period, as a result of which instrumentalists devised many new effects, such as the use of double stopping, and drew attention to their artistry with virtuoso runs akin to the extravagant language of the toccata.