7 Mystery Sonatas - Biber

Part of Kilkenny Arts Week's celebration of its 25th year has involved an outreach programme bringing events and exhibitions to venues around the county. The major musical undertaking of this welcome initiative was a concert at Duiske Abbey, Graignamanagh, last night, involving the Kilkenny-resident Swiss violinist Maya Homburger in a performance of seven of the remarkable Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber (1644-1704). Simply put, these pieces are not only among the greatest music of their time but also among the greatest violin sonatas of any time. As a set, they are special on any number of counts. There are 15 sonatas in all, each celebrating a separate mystery of the Rosary. And, using the technique known as scordatura, each involves a different tuning for the violin. By this means Biber was able to invest each sonata with a sound character of its own.

The instrument resonates according to the way it is tuned, and the tunings are chosen to strengthen particular chords in individual pieces. The notes that, so to speak, lie easily under the fingers vary from sonata to sonata, as does, from tuning to tuning, the range of improbable if not impossible effects that become practicable.

One of the heights of Biber's endeavours is reached in Sonata No. 11, "The Resurrection" from the "Glorious Mysteries", where the two middle strings are literally crossed (in the pegbox and beyond the bridge), providing physical symbolism as well as the means to his particular musical ends.

All this, of course, would be as nought, if Biber lacked the compositional imagination to back up his understanding of the finer points of violin technique. But his sonatas are by turns fantastical, grave, flighty, expressively probing, and unusually rich in unexpected harmonic turns and tangily sharp melodic twists. Using (of necessity) four violins, Homburger and her large but sensitively balanced continuo team gave a sense of relishing the minutiae of this ever-engrossing music, surpassing themselves in the pathos of No. 6 ("The Agony in the Garden"), the intensity of No. 10 ("The Crucifixion") and the floating conclusion of No. 14 ("The Assumption of the Virgin"). This was an occasion where music and performers seemed ideally matched.