"Les Sonates du Rosaire" forment l'un des cycles les plus originaux jamais composés pour le violon et qui fit la célébrité de Biber jusqu'à nos jours. Utilisant un accord du violon différent (scordatura) dans chacune de ses 15 sonates - toutes interprétées sur le même instrument d'Amati -, ce cycle représente le sommet de l'invention baroque et du style virtuose du XVIIe siècle. Distingué par un Gramophone Award, le duo Andrew Manze - Richard Egarr relève ce défi de manière éblouissante. Andrew Manze joue sur un violon Amati, 1700 ; archet de Gerhard Landwehr, Heemstede, 1988 d'après un modèle italien. Ce titre est paru pour la première fois en 2004.

Since it's founding in Freiburg in 1958, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi has been one of the most important and ambitious labels for period performances. Over decades, globally-acclaimed recordings were created with outstanding musicians. The limited edition "Deutsche Harmonia Mundi: 100 Great Recordings" contains 100 outstanding DHM recordings with some of the most important and best artists in their field: Nuria Rial, Dorothee Mields, Al Ayre Espanol, Hille Perl, Concentus Musicus Wien, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Freiburger Barockorchester, Skip Sempé, Capriccio Stravagante, La Petite Bande, Gustav Leonhardt, Andrew Lawrence-King, Frieder Bernius, the Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Thomas Hengelbrock and many others.

For much of the Baroque period, there was no useful distinction between orchestral and chamber music. All music, unless performed in church or on some festive occasion, was cultivated in the home, and even the concertos of Vivaldi and Bach rarely require more than a dozen people for an adequate performance. These "sonatas," which consist of single movement compositions with several linked sections, variously employ violins, violas, trumpets (and drums), cellos and continuo instruments (harpsichord, organ, lute). Biber had a unique ability to come up with catchy tunes and arrange them in formally satisfying way. The music is brilliant and consistently engaging. So are these performances.

Eduard Melkus brought Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's (1644-1704) Rosary Sonatas (Rosenkranzsonaten) to new life with his groundbreaking 1967 recording; in the six decades that have passed since then, the pieces, which are as virtuoso as they are meditative in mood, have conquered a firm place in the discographies of ambitious baroque violinists. The Austrian violinist Gunar Letzbor has been considered one of the leading interpreters of this famous cycle since he recorded his interpretation on album for the Arcana label in 1996. The success was overwhelming: the critics were enthusiastic and the recording is still today available in the label's catalogue.

While the more famous Mystery Sonatas have quickly found friends, the 1681 set is still largely unknown. Yet what's immediately noticeable from this premiere recording of the sonatas is that Biber isn't only a legendary virtuoso, probably never bettered in the 17th or 18th centuries, but one of the most inventive composers of his age: bold and exciting, certainly, but also elusive, mercurial and mysterious. Most of the works are preludes, arias and variations of an unregulated nature: improvisatory preludes over naked pedals and lucid arias juxtaposing with eccentric rhetorical conceits are mixed up in an unpredictable phantasm of contrast, and yet at its best it all adds up to a unified structure of considerable potency.

Der Dirigent und Lautenist Konrad Junghändel ist durch seine Zusammenarbeit mit mit Ensembles wie Les Arts Florissants, La Petite Bande, Musica Antiqua Köln bekannt geworden. Die fortgesetzte Beschäftigung mit der vokalen Musik des Barock führte Junghänel 1987 zur Gründung des Vokalensembles Cantus Cölln, das sich innerhalb kürzester Zeit zu einem der führenden Ensembles entwickelte. Diese limitierte Edition umfasst 10 Alben mit herausragenden Aufnahmen Junghänels für das Label DHM, 6 davon als Lautenist, 4 mit Cantus Cölln.

A disc of music by the two most talented composers of seventeenth-century Austria and Bohemia is welcome and doubly so when the performances are as lively as these. Philip Pickett and his New London Consort have chosen a varied programme of pieces by Austrian Schmelzer and Bohemian Biber and while I would not advise anyone to listen uninterrupted to the entire disc, taken in sensible doses it should afford pleasure. Schmelzer was born in the 1620s, eventually attaining a position of the highest importance at the Vienna court. Biber was born in 1644 and in 1670 entered the service of the Prince-Archbishops of Salzburg, with whom he remained until his death in 1704. The programme assembled here is culled from various collections and publications and reflects an assortment of stylistic influences and range of colours and sonorities.

Italian violinists invaded germanic countries from the beginning of the 17th century, with Farina in Dresden, Marini in Neuburg and Bertali in Vienna. Their influence was considerable, stretching over the entire Empire to the furthest flung towns of Central or Northern Germany. The Italian sonata went hand in hand with the violin, exemplifying a taste for the fantastic and the baroque. Michal Praetorius, despite his knowledge of Italian musical practice, preferred to discuss the instrument under its German name of "Geige", although the term of "violino" soon began to appear in every musical publication In this eagerly awaited, special prized re-release of his remarkable anthology of early violin music, François Fernandez gives a us a masterly and higly seductive lesson of style.

Since the earliest recordings of Biber’s Rosenkranz or Mystery Sonatas made during the 1960s, there has been ever-growing interest in these beautiful pieces and a wealth of recordings. In the dedication to his patron, Max Gandolph, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Biber explained that the subject of each Sonata is a section from the Catholic devotion known as the Rosary. He arranged the 15 Sonatas, scored for violin and continuo, into equal groups of Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries, and concluded the cycle with an unaccompanied Passacaglia which provokes a meditative coda to the 15 central events in Christian history. This piece and the opening sonata of the set are alone in not requiring scordatura – that is, retuning of the violin strings which enables composers to achieve unconventional sounds as well as facilitating some fingerings.

Several masses with large orchestration attest to the outstanding compositional skills of the Salzburg master Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704) in coping with large ensembles. As usual in Salzburg, Biber expects polychoral performances. The church music at the Salzburg cathedral drew its orientation from the performance practice in Venice. The Missa Alleluia was probably composed after 1690 and certainly before 1698, because a manuscript was made in Kremsmunster that year. The original score and sheets from Salzburg are lost. Excellent copies have been preserved at the Upper Austrian abbey at Kremsmunster: they serve as a basis for the present recording. Biber has fully exploited the possibilities of Baroque Instrumentation in the Missa Alleluia: a chorus with 2 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 tenors and 2 bass voices grants him a large number of combinations of voices and thus constant change of timbre. The strings choir also has six parts, with both violins often conducted virtuosically. A chorus with 3 trumpets and 2 cornetti is even surpassed in tonal mass by the chorus composed of 2 clarini, 4 trumpets, and timpani. This large number of trumpets emphasizes the cheerful character of the work and is very luxurious by Austrian standards.

Georg Muffat’s “Missa in labore requies” alongside church sonatas of his contemporaries make up audite’s latest offering in the series of polychoral baroque music recorded by renowned Early Music performers.
With its octagonal layout and four galleries, the Abbey Church at Muri provides an ideal acoustic for performing polychoral music. The galleries surround the main body of the church, placing the audience in the midst of the musical event. This sound experience is unique, both in concert and in recordings. The considerable distance between the galleries creates challenges in the musical interaction of the different groups.

Of all the recordings now available of Biber…this [is] by far and away the most spectacular, exuberant, colourful and downright ravishing of them all. Huggett positively revels in the virtuosity of Biber’s original…Huggett’s beautifully crafted performance of the complex and, at times, profoundly moving solo Passacaglia rounds off what is a matchless recording from every perspective.

Like many of his German and Austrian contemporaries, Bohemian-born composer Heinrich von Biber was strongly influenced by the Italian school of violin composition that included Biagio Marini (1587-1665) and Marco Uccellini (1603-1680). A noted virtuoso himself, Biber and his teacher Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1621-1680) were two of the most important figures of the late seventeenth-century Viennese violin style. Biber's keen understanding of the technical and expressive possibilities of the instrument is evident in his innovative use of pizzicato (plucking of the string with the finger), double and triple stops (more than one note played at once creating "chords"), col legno (stick of the bow on the string), sul ponticello (played close to the bridge), and, especially, scordatura (intentional "mistuning" of the strings). Scordatura allowed the performer to play chords in particular keys more easily, extended the range of notes, and provided more open strings in order to negotiate the difficulty of polyphonic writing for a single instrument. Biber's imaginative and original use of these techniques or special effects brought violin virtuosity to an entirely new level of musical expression in the Baroque period. It can be argued that J. S. Bach's masterful Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, written in 1720, are direct descendants of Biber's grounding breaking Mystery or Rosary Sonatas, composed nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

Biber’s reputation as an outstanding musician led the prince-archbishop of Salzburg to poach him from the Count Liechtenstein-Castelcorn in 1670. Six years later, the composer published his Sonatae tam aris quam aulis servientes, paying tribute to the sacred and secular activities of his Salzburg patron. Under Manfredo Kraemer’s leadership, the Rare Fruits Council gives a superb account of this music. The ensemble is deftly controlled throughout and trumpets add a brilliant gloss.

Reinhard Goebel and members of the Musica Antiqua Köln give an almost effortless and very listenable performance of Heinrich Ignatz Franz von Biber's Mystery Sonatas here. This is no mean feat, in that each of these sonatas save the first, and the final Passacaglia, is in a different and weird -scordatura- tuning.