Here's another posting, in the manner of this previous one a few days ago, about a CD of rather obscure music that is well worth investigating if you like that sort of thing.
I'm talking about a double disc of violin sonatas I have recently acquired, composed by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644-1704 or 1705 - there seems to be disagreement), and played by period violinist John Holloway. These are the so-called "Mystery Sonatas", and if you scroll down at Holloway's site, you'll find a reference to these discs. The recording of them was done in 1991, and it has recently been reissued as a bargain double. I got it at HMV Oxford Street, for a mere tenner. It is very fine.
I was provoked into purchasing these discs by hearing what I now realise was a far more recent and even more remarkable recording by John Holloway, also of Biber violin sonatas, on BBC Radio 3 on Thursday February 5th. On that morning we lucky Radio-3-ites heard Holloway playing Biber's Violin Sonata No. 3 in F, which dates from 1681. It is a truly extraordinary piece, full of super-virtuosity and high spirits of the sort you would expect more from something written by Bartok, or maybe by some gypsy violin king. I will keep an eye open for this disc in the second hand shops – and for anything else by John Holloway come to that, because he is an amazing musician. (I see that he has done some Bach violin sonatas also.) Until now, Holloway was to me just an obscure name, but that has all now changed.
My particular bugbear about "period" musicians, which I have often blogged about, is the way so many of them come down like elephants descending from airplanes without parachutes on the first notes of every bar. Holloway doesn't do this. When he plays it, it still sounds like music, rather than like some mad old music teacher beating time, and nothing else.
More to the point, he really sounds - and again, as so many period musicians seem to make a point of not sounding - like he wants to get the absolute most he can out of his instrument, and make it sound just as glamourous and exciting and enthralling and effective as he can, as Biber himself also used to do, apparently. Biber didn't play his sonatas while thinking: "I must be careful not to make this sound like Tchaikovsky." He played them for all they were worth.
