Johann Paul von Westhoff (1656-1705) was one of the most brilliant members of the significant school of violinists that flourished in seventeenth-century Dresden. This impressive virtuoso, who was even applauded by Louis XIV at Versailles, wrote the very first compositions for unaccompanied violin, which of course foreshadow the later masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach. The programme recorded here includes some suites from his collection published in Dresden in 1696, as well as the suite that was printed in the Mercure galant of Paris in 1683, following his visit to Versailles.

The opus most decisive for Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's fame and widely used into the 18th century are the eight sonatas for violin and basso continuo published in 1681. Since the Sonatae unarum fidium by the Viennese violin virtuoso Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, published in 1664, no violin solos of comparable extraordinary compositional and technical ambition had appeared. With his sonatas of 1681, Biber succeeded in setting new standards and achieving a previously unattained synthesis of equally high virtuoso demands, artistic content and compositional technical level. Our exceptional violinist Plamena Nikitassova uses a historical playing technique for her interpretation - a technique that is hardly cultivated any more even among baroque violinists.

The Italian violinist and composer Carlo Zuccari (1704-1792) worked from 1741 in Milan, where he was the leader of Giovanni Battista Sammartini’s famous orchestra. In the 1760s he was in London as member of the Italian opera orchestra and published there his “True Method of Playing an Adagio”); in 1765 he returned to Milan.