Luogo e data di registrazione		(luogo di registrazione non indicato) - 1966
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		-
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9497-B (Stereo) - AWT 9497-C (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 47' 06" | (p) 1966 | ANA Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | 6.41071 AS (SAWT 9497-B) | 1 LP - durata 47' 06" | (p) 1966 | ANA | Riedizione
-2	Edizione CD		Teldec Classics | LC 6019 | 3984-21765-2 | 1 CD - durata 47' 06" | (c) 1998 | ADD
	Cover		"Md. de Mondonville am Klavier", Gemälde von Maurice Quentin de la Tour.
	Note		-

Among the composers who, through their performing and writing, won a leading place for the violin alongside the harpsichord in French chamber music of the first halft of the 18th  century, Jean Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville  occupies an honourable place. Born at Narbonne in 1711, he already made his voice heard in Paris in 1733 with his "Sonates pour le Violon Op. 1", and in 1734 he made his début as a violinist "d'une manière très brillante" at the Concert Spirituel, the trend-setting public concert of the metropolis. He also won success very soon as a composer of church music. In 1738 the management of the Concerts Spirituels offered him a fixed annual salary of 1200 livres "pour ses motets et pour jouer le Violon," and he performed together with his most important rivals, the violin virtuosi and composers Guignon and Guillemain. In 1748 he joined the management of the Concerts Spirituels, he was their organizer and conductor 1755-1762 and, in addition, "Administrator" of the Court Orchestra 1745-1758 - all in all, a key figure for decades in Parisian musicall life and a celebrated and self-confident master, also in the fields of opera and church music. Mondonville's output faithfully reflects the changing fashions of Parisian musical life between 1730 and 1770. At the beginning of his career there stand, alongside some lost violon concertos, the great, partly pioneering chamber music works: the Violin Sonatas Op. 1 (1733), the Trio Sonatas Op. 2 (1734), the "Pièces de Clavecin en Sonates avec Accompagnement de Violon Op. 3" (ca. 1734), the Violin Sonatas with Continuo Op. 4 (ca. 1735) and the "Pièces de Clavecin avec Voix ou Violon Op. 5" (1748). After this, Mondonville's chamber music composition ceases abruptly; instead, church music occupies the central place in his activities until well into the fifties, and in the degree to which the opera held Paris in suspense with the impending revolution of the "tragédie lyrique" through Gluck, composition for the stage also came to the fore. In the last decades of his life, Mondonville wrote exclusively for the Paris opera. The decisive historical and artistic achievements of this composer are, however, not his operas but his early chamber music works, above all the violin sonatas. It was they that established his fame in Paris, being played, listened to and discussed at all the focal points of the capital's musical life. Mondonville at once found the idiom best suited to the Parisian cultivation of chamber music, with its combination of social brilliance, cultured entertainment and soundness of knowledge. The Violin Sonatas Op. 1 already display his characteristic style - the easy, playful and elegant blend of graceful rococo melody, soundness and delicacy of technique, select, subtle and distinctively surprising harmony and brilliant writing for the violin. In the later works an experimental spirit and a delight in technical problems come more into the foreground without disturbing the charm of the general impression. Here, as everywhere else in mondonville's works, the spirit of 18th century France has assumed musical shape in the most graceful manner, and it is this, independently of any historical signifcance of the works, that lends them their undimished freshness and attractiveness. The six "Pièces en Sonates" on our record (Op. 3, ca. 1734) mark the beginning of a new type of composition in France: the "classical" piano-violin sonata in which the two instruments play together on an equal footing and an 'obligato' basis. They differ from Bach's violin sonatas in the free part-writing and 'concertante' character of their structure, from the earlier baroque violin sonata in freeing themselves from the continuo and transferring the forms and techniques of the French harpsichord piece to the ensemble sonata. In this combination of violin sonata and harpsichord piece, Mondonville has thoroughly exploited all the possible combinations, shadings and instrumental techniques that there was hardly anything left for his successors to do. This is all the more true in that his blending of types corresponds stylistically to an equally logical combination of French and Italian idioms and forms from the miniature-like Parisian clavecin-pièce to the Italian concerto à la Vivaldi. around 1734 Mondonville's sonatas stand solitary in a fertile but still fallow field. At a first glance, their form is consistently that of an Italian concerto: Allegro, aria und Allegro, the latter usually designated as Giga. However, behind the neutral term Aria, there hide a wide variety of slow movement models, and the first and last sonatas are thrown into relief as "French" and "Italian" prototypes: the first by a French overture as its opening movement, the last as an Italian concerto with "tutti" and "soli." Thus the elements ingeniously and entertainingly blended in the rest of the sonatas of the series are introduced programmatically at the beginning and the end. The wit, elegance and cosmopolitan spirit of the early "dixhuitième" have seldom entered works of musical art more authentically. Ludwig Finscher