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From Martin Chalifour: Tresors Ensevelis, Hidden Treasures. I have always been drawn to lesser-known music, and long ago began to collect old manuscripts. This album includes some unusual arrangements that waited patiently for the right occasion to be rediscovered and now shared with you. I am fortunate to spend much of my working life in Walt Disney Concert Hall, where I serve as Principal Concertmaster for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was a treat for me to record this album in our auditorium, one of the modern world s acoustic treasures. Many violinists, myself included, perform the Poulenc sonata for violin. However I have long wanted to introduce the magnificent Poulenc Flute Sonata into the string repertoire. The idea first came to me when I heard the slow movement in concert and imagined the violin being able to slide and have a gutsier sound in the lower register. In my arrangement of the sonata I add double stops, pizzicati, and transpositions to lower registers in areas where the flute has less power than a bowed instrument. In the Cantilena I take it further and tune the violin's G string a half step lower, giving the violin a deeper resonance throughout the key of B-Flat Minor. These Schönberg duets are pure fun to play. Along with this album's Stravinsky pieces, I wanted to celebrate some famous composers who lived in Southern California. I occasionally had trouble deciphering the hand of the approximately six-year-old Schönberg. I had to repeat a bar here or there to make the two violin parts coincide, but that is the nature of a hand-written manuscript from such a young composer. La Plus que Lente by Debussy is an arrangement, very dear to me, by violinist Leon Roques. It complements the other music on our recording, and serves as one of my favorite encores. I could not resist including the Ravel Sonata, especially in the company of Debussy and Poulenc. This masterpiece stands as the only work on our recording that was originally written for violin and piano.