The CD includes the sonatas for two violas by the French composer Jean-Marie Leclair. It reveals the wealth and the unique beauty of the viola art from the age of the French Classicism. As it happened often during this period, Leclair began his artistic career as a ballet-dancer in France and Italy. Simultaneously with the dance he practised the violin and became a famous violinist, member of the Royal String Orchestra and author of a number of compositions for stringed instruments. The recorded 6 sonatas were created in the late 1740s in Paris. They are magnificent works which give a right idea of the development of the performing art of the above-mentioned period and impress with their melodic inventiveness and virtuosity. Composed as a three- or four-movement sonata cycle, they combine features of the Baroque polyphonic way of thinking with exquisite interweaving of the voices and distinctly expressed harmonic texture. The specific steadiness and contrast, characteristic of the Classicism, have a particularly great emotional impact on the audience. The music radiates calmness and attracts not only with its melodiousness but with its elegance too. The performance of the violists Johannes Flieder (violist-soloist since 1980 of the Viennese symphonic orchestra) and the Bulgarian Dimitar Penkov (who in 1983 settled in Hannover and gives concerts throughout Europe) without doubt is an example for interpreting this kind of music. The two musicians play on splendid instruments made by great masters. Violists of highest level, Flieder and Penkov have penetrated deep into the style and content of the compositions. They achieve complete creative synchrony and lead their parts skillfully transforming them into garlands of melodies, which radiate a true esthetic pleasure.
 
Recorded in the Palais of Bückenburg, September 1997 and in the Studio of NDR Hannover, January 1998