The viola until today oftentimes suffers from the dominance of her small sister, the violin. György Ligeti put it like this: "The violin leads, the...

The viola until today oftentimes suffers from the dominance of her small sister, the violin. György Ligeti put it like this: "The violin leads, the viola remains in the shadows. But through the deep C string the viola has a unique dryness, compact, somewhat throaty with the smoky taste of wood, earth and tannin.” This wasn't always the case, and composers of the Baroque era highly esteemed the sound of the viola da braccio, before it was modernized to be technically more playable, yet at the cost of lacking the original sustained sound. Pandolfis Consort with Elzbieta Sajka-Bachler, viola, Matthias Krampe, harpsichord, Hermann Platzer, archlute and Günter Schagerl, cello commence on a journey to discover the typical darker, melancholic sound of the original viola. This album by the title “Imagination” features representative concerts, sonatas and fantasias by Georg Friedrich Handel, Georg Philip Telemann, Christian Podbielski, Michel Corrette, Christian Michael Wolff and Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach on period instruments