Rating 5/5
Review:
An outstanding recording
This is simply wonderful.
Biber's Mystery Sonatas are extraordinary works in themselves, and
Rachel Podger produces something really special in her performances here.
The music is a series of sonatas for violin which Biber wrote
to represent key events in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Biber was a very fine violinist and composer
and in my view these sonatas are among the very best music he wrote. It is expressive, emotionally intense and
often very beautiful. He demands that the violin be retuned in unusual ways for
each sonata (a technique called scordatura) which produces some extraordinarily
atmospheric effects. It's amazing music
which I have liked and admired for years in excellent recordings by both John
Holloway and Andrew Manze, but I have always found it slightly forbidding music
somehow. This performance by Rachel
Podger has changed all that.
Technically, of course, she is superb and is rightly
regarded as one of the world's leading baroque violinists. She has the skill
and technique to make these extremely difficult pieces sound completely
natural, with no sense of strain anywhere – just a deep involvement in what the
music is saying. Her tone is beautifully
warm and she has a way of making the music accessible and welcoming without
ever losing any of its intensity or intellectual weight. She is beautifully matched in this by an
excellent group of continuo players and the whole thing is an absolute delight.
Ten years ago, Rachel Podger transformed the Bach Sonatas
and Partitas for me in her recording of them by showing me a way into the heart
of the music and what it is really about in a way no-one else had managed. She has done the same here with the Mystery
Sonatas. This is an absolutely outstanding
recording (there will be something seriously wrong if it is not a strong
contender in the next Gramophone Awards) and I can recommend it extremely
warmly.
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