Duos for violin and viola (Faust; Riebl) (2004)

"Rolla wrote most of these duets for himself and another performer, around 1820, and they're compact evocations of music in larger media. Sample the very Beethovenian "Allegro" of the Duet in C minor, Op. 4, No. 2, for instance; the music does not simply make big minor-key gestures, but holds together in a Beethovenian way. Also quite modern are the "pollacca" and "Pollonese" movements, very early examples of the flowering of Polish and Eastern European rhythms that were to come, and very elegantly handled by Faust and violist Thomas Riebl. The music is not outwardly showy, but string players will noticed many small technical ingenuities, and the superb engineering by Koichiro Hattori, working at Switzerland's Künstlerhaus Boswil, is almost worth the price of admission in itself; Riebl's viola seems to purr. Strongly recommended". (James Manheim, Allmusic).