Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 1 (Sanderling)

In the early 1950s, the switch from standard 78-rpm records to the new long-playing ones occasioned, in some countries, some pretty strange hybrid types. Deutsche Grammophon had a "variable micrograde" 78 shellac disc, playable with an ordinary 78-size stylus, that managed to extend the timing of a 12-inch disc to eight minutes. These didn't last long; by 1952 DGG bowed to the future and began producing 33-rpm LPs. In the Soviet Union, LPs were also launched about 1952, but with a twist - longer works were presented as 33-rpm records, but shorter ones were issued on 8-inch or 10-inch 78-rpm vinyl records, playable with the same microgroove stylus as the 33-rpm LPs. I'm aware of only one issue on Soviet microgroove 78s that offered an extended work on two records, and this is it:

Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C Major, BWV 1066
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Kurt Sanderling
Issued c. 1953
USSR D-893/6, two 10-inch vinyl microgroove 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 85.34 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 52.52 MB)

This appears to be the first Soviet recording of a Bach orchestral work other than a solo concerto or a transcription, and it's fitting that Kurt Sanderling (1912-2011) should have been chosen to make it. Born a Jew in Germany, he fled east when the Nazis took power, becoming co-conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic (with Yevgeny Mravinsky) before returning back to East Berlin in 1960. His performance of the Bach Suite sounds rather old-fashioned in some ways, with stately tempi and no continuo instrument, but in terms of scholarship, it's quite up-to-date, with all cadential trills observed, even those usually missing from contemporaneous recordings of the Bach suites.