Alice Piérot - Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber: Mysterien Sonaten (2002)

The field of performances competing for your CD purchase dollar has grown crowded in the case of Henrich Ignaz Franz Biber's Mystery Sonatas (or Rosary Sonatas), a set of 16 pieces for solo violin and continuo programatically linked to the Passion story. This performance by violinst Alice Piérot and Les veilleurs de Nuit is part of a remarkable series from France's Alpha label, pairing mostly Baroque works with paintings of the era. The package for this disc shows an image of Mary awaiting the Annunciation, painted around 1475 by the Neapolitan Antonello da Messina. It's two centuries older than the Biber cycle, and it's quite simple -- the painting has nothing of the wildly ornate, extreme, experimental quality of Biber's music, which makes extensive use of scordatura or unorthodox violin tuning. The point made by art historian Denis Grenier in his notes, however, is that painting was a powerful statement of subjectivity or interiority, qualities certainly relevant to Biber. Of the available performances of the Mystery Sonatas, Piérot's lies close to the subjective, emotional end of the scale. She emphasizes the directly programmatic aspects of the work -- check out the lashing quality of her Scourging at the Pillar sonata, for example -- and the slow introductions to various sonatas are treated with a high degree of rhythmic freedom. Overall it's a meaty and full-blooded approach to the work, marred only by the unfortunate inclusion of ambient noise (breathing, bows making contact with hard surfaces). This performance splits the difference between harpsichord and organ continuo accompaniments by employing a claviorgan, an unusual hybrid organ with a row of harpsichord strings; the other continuo instruments heard are a gamba and theorbo. Also sample the daring version of the Mystery Sonatas by Andrew Manze, who brutally retunes a single violin throughout (Piérot, like most other players, uses a set), but this is an above-average Biber entry with a nice dose of the gutsy, hell-for-leather quality that brings out the best in the Baroque violin.