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.

In the Europe of the first half of the seventeenth century, instrumental music became a source of sonic and expressive experimentation. Influenced by vocal rhetoric, composers sought to replace words with a new musical language. The virtuosity of the instrumentalists developed, as did invention, improvisation and the search for surprising sonorities. Along with the organ or the harpsichord, the violin was the instrument of choice for experimenting with these new techniques. Italian and German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Farina, Schmelzer, Mealli, Buxtehude, Biber, Pisendel and Bach vied with each other in imaginativeness… The violinist Chouchane Siranossian and the harpsichordist Leonardo García Alarcón – both loyal Alpha Classics artists – have chosen to explore this repertory, here including Bach’s sonatas BWV 1019, 1021 and 1023 among other pieces.

In what Et’cetera has described as Volume I, Pavlo Beznosiuk couples three of Westhoff’s suites for solo violin from 1696 with six items from Walther’s scherzos from 1676. His program opens with Walther’s Sonata VIII, offering a startling initial barrage of signature chords and double-stops, giving way to flurries of rapid notes and studded with brilliant staccatos, beside which the demands of Corelli’s solos about a generation later pale, and the Sonata closes with fireworks that make a greater cumulative effect than the works of Locatelli, often identified as the precursor of Paganini’s technical demands.