Viola Sonatas / Two Songs

Firma Melodiya presents a release of Johannes Brahms's chamber music commemorating the outstanding Soviet and Russian sound engineer Pyotr Kirillovich Kondrashin. The son of the famous conductor, Pyotr Kondrashin was one of the leading sound engineers of Firma Melodiya for 25 years. He was in charge of studio and concert recordings of some of the major musicians, soloists, orchestras and theatre companies. In the 1990's, Kondrashin founded his own company, but a number of recordings he made remained unpublished for financial reasons. And now, Melodiya is resuscitating some of those recordings. Brahms's late chamber music - two sonatas for viola and piano and two songs for voice, piano and viola - are performed by famous musicians, graduates of the Gnessins Academy, who were at the outset of their careers in those years. They are Natalia Zagorinskaya, an opera and concert singer and future soloist of Helikon-Opera, violist Svyatoslav Belonogov, an accompanist of the viola group in symphony and chamber orchestras, who played under the batons of Vasily Sinaisky, Vladimir Spivakov, Mikhail Pletnev, Mstislav Rostropovich and Yehudi Menuhin, and pianist and concertmaster Georgy Mayorsky, who now appears at prestigious festivals and master classes in Western Europe. The high quality of these recordings in terms of both performance and technology puts them among the best recordings of academic music made in the 1990's. After a quarter of a century, the listeners have an opportunity to appreciate some of the last works done by the master of domestic sound engineering.