I can remember so well some 40 years ago being utterly taken aback by an unaccompanied violin Chaconne by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. Since then, Biber has become the mountain every period violinist wants to climb, and that Chaconne revealed as the last movement of a set of 16 sonatas depicting the mysteries of the rosary. They are fantastically complex works, with different violin tunings and multiple stoppings, so that Rachel Podger’s accomplished new recording sounds like a battery of many violins. Fine continuo adds to the variety of sound, but it would have been good to see some of the woodcut pictures of the rosary that appear in Biber’s score.
