Biber Complete 1681 Sonatas

Complete Violin Sonatas – 1681

BOJAN ČIČIĆ

|

THE ILLYRIA CONSORT

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) Complete Violin Sonatas – 1681

BOJAN

Ć THE ILLYRIA CONSORT

Bojan Čičić violin Elizabeth Kenny theorbo Siobhán Armstrong harp Steven Devine harpsichord, organ violin by Giovanni Grancino, Milan 1703 theorbo by Klaus Jacobsen, 1992 after Italian models Italian baroque triple harp by Enzo Laurenti, 2010 harpsichord by Colin Booth, 2013 after Christian Vater, 1738 four-stop chamber organ by Robin Jennings

Far from wishing to compare myself with Mr Manze, I hope that our similarities in terms of our appreciation of this music and shared love of Biber’s harmonic language and virtuosic writing will become apparent to the listener.

These works, like Walther’s Scherzi da violino published five years earlier, are a real gem in the violin repertoire of the seventeenth century and deserve to be more widely known, on a par with Biber’s nowadays far more popular Rosary Sonatas.

Bojan Čičić and The Illyria Consort gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the Continuo Foundation and of John Osborn CBE, without which this recording would not have been possible.

Recorded on 24-28 March 2024 in St Martin’s Church, East Woodhay, Hampshire Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: Drew Padrutt Booklet editor: Henry Howard Cover: based on illustrations by James Stewart from William Jardine’s Naturalist’s Library, Edinburgh, 1836 Session photography: Will Coates-Gibson/Foxbrush Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

Biber’s 1681 Violin Sonatas have been part of my life for a very long time. In fact, the recording made in 1994 by Andrew Manze with Romanesca was probably the very reason why I wanted to learn more about this composer in particular and baroque music in general. Without it, I don’t think I would have decided to leave my job and venture into the unknown, starting out as a baroque specialist wannabe, hoping one day to inspire a new generation of players with my recordings, just as I was inspired by Romanesca’s.

www.delphianrecords.com @ delphianrecords.com @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

Here’s to hearing a new complete recording of these sonatas in another 30 years’ time, played by someone who even now is only dreaming of becoming a baroque violin specialist.

— Bojan Čičić

CD1

CD2

Sonatae Violino solo, 1681 [Praeludium] 2 Adagio 3 Presto 4 Variationes 5 Finale 1

Sonata II

[Praeludium] 7 Aria 8 Variationes 9 Finale 6

Sonata III

[Sonata:] Adagio – Presto Aria & variationes I 12 Presto – Adagio – Allegro – Adagio 13 Variationes II 14 [Finale] 10 11

Sonatae Violino solo, 1681

Sonata IV

[Sonata] 16 Presto 17 Gigue – Double I – Double II 18 Adagio – [Allegro] – Adagio 19 Aria 20 Variationes 21 Finale 15

Sonata I

[1:39] [1:56] [0:48] [5:42] [2:06]

Sonata No. 84 in E major [1:09] [0:50] 22 Adagio [5:14] 23 [Aria & variationes I] [1:34] 24 [Aria & variationes II] 25 [Aria & variationes III] 26 Finale [2:11] [2:53]

Total playing time (CD 1) [3:08] [4:17] [0:44]

[1:13] [0:36] [2:13] [2:30] [0:48] [3:11] [1:33] [4:10] [3:09] [3:20] [2:22] [1:53] [61:26]

Sonata V

[Praeludium] 2 Variationes I 3 Presto 4 Aria 5 Variationes II 1

Sonata VI

[Sonata] 7 Passacagli 8 [Adagio] 9 Gavotte 10 Adagio 11 Allegro – Adagio 6

Sonata VIII 16 [Sonata] [2:36] 17 [Sonata II] [3:35] 18 Aria [1:46] 19 Sarabanda [1:04] 20 Allegro [– Gigue] [2:02] Sonata No. 81 in A major

[1:10] [1:46] [2:26] [1:55] [2:32]

21 Adagio [1:20] 22 Presto [4:42] 23 [Fantasia] [1:55] 24 Aria [2:16] 25 Variationes [1:58] [1:24] Total playing time (CD 2)

[1:19] [1:08] [2:47] [0:54] [5:46]

Sonata VII

Praeludium Aria: Presto 14 Adagio 15 Ciacona

12 13

[2:07] [3:58] [1:57] [5:01]

[59:36]

Notes on the music Immersive experiences are all the rage today.

From virtual reality headsets to vast 360˚ projections of canonical masterworks, the idea of a multisensory experience appears to be inextricably linked to the digital age.

Immersion, it seems, appeals to audiences easily distracted yet eager to enter a different mindset. Music and sound are paramount to such immersion: they form the emotional glue that seals the fissures of disbelief.

But immersion is nothing new. An altered state, brought about by an intense focus directed through various simultaneous sensory stimulations, has been a human desire throughout history. Until the eighteenth century, immersion and mysticism were deeply entwined; ritualistic tools and behaviours often formed part of a quasi-multimedia experience designed to heighten one’s concentration.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber is today mostly associated with his set of sonatas for solo violin composed around 1674, the so-called Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas, that played with these concepts by combining faith, its associated paraphernalia of enactment – the rosary as displayed in miniaturist icons – and sonic immersion. Across fifteen sonatas that form a cycle, Biber translated the iconography of the rosary into tone colours and musical gestures so as to induce enraptured states of mind by shifting attention from the beholder’s eye to their ear. Central to this collection, its affect and its symbolism was the technique of

scordatura: the retuning of one or more strings on the violin that alters the overall affective resonance of the instrument. In notating the technique, the composer directs the player’s mind to the haptic aspect of performance, away from the aural imagination and towards a more visceral engagement with the music, as the notation no longer prescribes particular pitches but instead indicates fingering – and therefore felt – patterns. The 1674 sonatas’ extensive, and at times symbolic, use of scordatura contributed significantly to their later reception as key pieces in the violin literature, canonised in scholarly editions from the late nineteenth century onwards. Hailed as a comprehensive example of an early modern composer’s use of tone colour through scordatura, they became the poster child for seventeenth-century virtuosic violin writing in the German-speaking world.

Yet during his lifetime and throughout the eighteenth century, it was for a different set of sonatas that Biber was celebrated. His collection of eight Sonatae violino solo were first published in 1681 and reprinted and published several times thereafter. In these sonatas, Biber made a more immediate and daring connection between the individual human – represented by himself – and faith, not through the intermediary of the church and its practices, but by striving for an altered, quasi-spiritual frame of mind achieved by the power of immersing oneself in complex

thought. He indicated the elevation of the individual by replacing the small religious icons that adorned each Mystery Sonata with a striking engraving of his own likeness: his Sonatae violino solo are prefaced with a frontispiece that elevates the composer from a mere musicus to a man of science and virtue. Mimicking in its layout the title page with its dedication to Maximilian Gandolph von Kuehnburg, archbishop of Salzburg, the frontispiece features Biber’s portrait accompanied by the tools of his art (the scroll and the quill) and of his craft (violin and keyboard). An inscription clarifies his status as the archbishop’s Vice-Kapellmeister while a Gnadenpfennig – a gilded ornament traditionally gifted by German rulers as a token of their appreciation to carefully selected subjects – is suspended on a golden chain around the composer’s neck. Biber petitioned Emperor Leopold I twice for promotion to the noble ranks, and it was in response to the first such petition that he received – if not a noble title – this decoration. Beneath his towering portrait, the engraving displays Biber’s spinet on one side and, on the other, his violin and a scroll of his new collection’s Sonata I. In between these two sets of violin sonatas, Biber had composed two sets of ensemble pieces: the Sonatae tam aris quam aulis servientes, a collection of sonatas for five to eight instruments, some for strings alone, others including trumpets, were published

in 1676, followed in 1680 by Mensa sonara, seu musica instrumentalis. The title of the latter, ‘The Sonorous Banquet’, indicates their secular nature, while that of the earlier collection states that it was intended for use at both sacred and secular occasions. This was not unusual, and Biber devised much of his music to serve interchangeably across these contexts; only dances – particularly balletti – were considered distinctly secular in character.

The dual function became particularly significant in Biber’s reimagining of music’s powers in the service of faith in these 1681 sonatas. While his employment with the archbishop required the provision of music for sacred settings, Biber’s employer was also well known for his wider patronage of music as entertainment and as balm for the soul outside of a strictly liturgical setting. In composing the 1681 set, Biber gave this his own interpretation by combining the secular admiration of the virtuoso with the spiritual immersion reached through concentration and mental complexity. He combined these in a musical edifice that lured the listener to hear sounds in tandem with the thrillingly felt imagination of their production through the new and extreme heights of virtuosity demanded of the performer. In his often quasi-improvisatory compositions, a spirituality that focussed on the idea of Erbauung, i.e. an elevation of the soul through strenuous exercise of the mind that would lead to inner

Notes on the music growth, comes together with Jesuit practices of meditation through sensory, and particularly haptic, stimulation.

The snippet of music visible on the frontispiece sets the tone for the collection. Over a pedal note, Biber performs a simple exploration of the A major triad in fantasia-like bursts that are determined by the violinist’s sense of time alone. Four of the eight sonatas open with such improvisatory praeludia, musical musings that take the listener into the inner world of the performer’s mind. The title ‘sonata’ does not describe the multi-movement work that the term was to denote in the eighteenth century; in Biber’s time sonatas featured less regular musical structures that allowed the composer to explore both the violin’s different sonorities across its registers and the performer’s versatility in conjuring myriad affects. Biber’s penchant for juxtaposing effects of timbre with polyphonic textures comes to the fore here. Scordatura, the determining device in the Mystery Sonatas, was by 1681 subsumed into Biber’s overall toolbox as just one of his many timbral devices that allowed the music to match keys and modulations with colours.

Sonata IV requires a retuning of three of the four strings to produce a haptic frame that facilitates polyphonic playing in D major.

Indeed, Biber commences the sonata with a unison double stop produced by doubling the third finger on the A-string (which sounds d´´) – with the lowered E-string (also sounding

d´´); at the same time, raising the open d´ to an e´ aids the violinist’s use of thirds and sixths on the lower strings in particular. The recoupling of aural imagination and physical sensation, forced on the player by the practice of scordatura, is playfully executed in Sonata VI: the violinist must retune the top string midsonata during a two-bar interlude in the bass, which leads to a quasi-extempore section – like a second praeludium – over a pedal note that allows the violinist to relish the new sound of the instrument’s top string. Here, the scordatura ushers in a change of timbre and of affect not dissimilar to that achieved by adding a mute to alter the violin’s inherent harmonic overtone sequence.

Biber’s most important structuring device, which allows him to construct the typical longmovement forms while retaining the music’s extemporising character, is the ground bass.

Each sonata contains at least one elongated passage over repeating bass patterns and Biber exploits their mesmeric potential to combine typically German polyphonic writing with Italianate improvisatory diminution practices.

He introduces the collection’s prevailing character through Sonata I’s exceptionally long ground bass extemporisation: over 232 bars the repeating four-note bass line supports a full catalogue of melodic variation patterns and violinistic tricks starting with a simple (though still two-voiced) aria-like melody which is soon elaborated on in a triplet pattern that takes the

violinist across the four strings in pleasingly undulating movements. The subsequent return to melodic thirds leads into a bowing game that explores different rhythmic patterns.

Two further variations explore broken octave patterns, interspersed with only fleeting reminders of the original lyrical melody. The latter recurs as an anchor between diminutions over the ground bass in the form of rapid runs, bariolage-executed broken chords – particularly haptically effective as the violinist’s right arm swings like a perpetuum mobile across the adjacent strings – and demanding triple-stopped passages. Biber rounds off the movement with a return to the character of the opening Praeludium in which the bass provides the stillness of the pedal as a stark contrast to the relentless recurrence of the earlier ground bass pattern. The sonata presents the violinist’s continuous journey through his bravura performance, inviting the listener along on this physical and mental journey as they become almost viscerally ensnared in the piece’s extreme demands through its ground bass’s subliminal inevitability.

Biber exploits the crossover between the principle of ground bass and diminution and the melody-and-variation form. Across these sonatas, he combines this exploration with intermittent moments of repose as he returns to a sonata’s Aria or to the short adagios that hark back to earlier material. In his arias he demands a highly affective performance, while

some variations are unusually detailed in their precisely notated technical requirements.

Sonata II contains intricately notated bowing patterns across triplet semiquavers, for instance, lending this particular variation a dance-like character, while the sonata’s Finale prescribes affective contrasts through its careful declamatory notation.

Several sonatas – numbers IV, VI, and VIII – contain overt dance movements that transport the listener temporarily into the realms of social music-making, before their variations (also known as ‘doubles’) pull the listener back into a musical complexity that gives a nod to German church music of the time. Sonata IV takes the listener on this journey through two sets of such variations, the first over an overt Gigue and the second over one of Biber’s heartfelt arias. In the latter’s variations the composer moves rapidly into the church-style idiom with a three-voiced third variation and a short quasi-fugato fourth variation. Sonata V presents two sets of ground basses and Biber imaginatively expands the variations above each to include entirely new melodic material which provides the repose of an Adagio even as the ground bass proceeds ever onwards. In Sonata VI, in contrast, he soon begins to vary the ground bass pattern of his ‘Passacagli’, providing continuity to his stream of (virtuosic) consciousness through aural reminiscences in the rhythmic material.

The subsequent Gavotta spins into variations

Notes on the music after only two bars, twirling the listener into a state of close engagement with the detail. In Sonata VII, Biber combines his compositional and violinistic mastery in a Praeludium that soon reverses the bass and treble roles; its subsequent Aria (Presto) with double-contrapuntal variations; an Adagio with intricately notated bowing ornamentations in its variation; and a final contrapuntally introduced Ciacona that takes the violinist through his paces. As a tour de force it is superseded only by the scale of contrapuntal writing introduced in Sonata VIII which is notated on three staves throughout and presents the height of Biber’s polyphonic writing for solo violin. The notation visually displays the three-part texture yet the solo violinist must combine the two duetting treble parts in a single pair of hands.

Biber would have been familiar with Jesuit meditation through his own early education in Bohemia, a familiarity he shared with his employer, Maximilian Gandolph.

Central to these meditation practices was multisensory immersion through taste, smell and touch (real or imagined), combined with the contemplation of Biblical texts and iconography. This was executed through repetition, with its semblance of inevitability and eternity. In the 1681 set of sonatas, as in the Sonata in A major and the Sonata in E major which also feature on this recording, Biber invokes precisely this sense

of inevitability and eternity in the listener.

Variations play on the immediacy of fleeting motifs, many of which manifest physically through a particular violin technique of finger and arm movements. As composer and as violinist, he envelops the listener in the world of his motivic and sonic imagination.

The Sonata in E major, attributed to Biber in a manuscript collection of violin repertoire from the second half of the seventeenth century, balances the complexity typical of the church style and the secular sonata’s playfulness. Here, too, Biber invites the listener to engage deeply with both his art and his craft as he presents three sets of aria and variations, two of which combine this structuring device with his love for the ground bass. He allows them to flow into each other through free, quasi-improvisatory sections. In contrast with this sonata’s intricate architectural complexity, his Sonata in A major has the largest set of variations of any of his sonatas. Biber may have written the piece as early as 1670, preceding both of his solo sonata collections, yet his style was already recognisable in his careful notation of violinistic techniques such as the tremolo tardissime and the demisemiquaver passages. The Sonata was unknown until it was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century in Kroměříž in a manuscript collection of virtuosic violin repertoire collated in the late seventeeth century.

In 1897, in the wake of this rediscovery of Biber’s music, the Austrian musicologist Guido Adler deemed Biber the first German instrumental composer who could rival French and Italian musical creation of the time, noting that his virtuosity surpassed ‘vain illusion and flamboyance’ to show serious attention to the art of music. Indeed, throughout his solo violin sonatas, Biber stretches his listeners’ attention to allow them to partake in a virtuosity that is a meditation on the human condition, on temporal beauty and external significance, and on the celebration of a profound virtue that resides in the combination of honesty, nobility, the quest for perfection, profound affect and reason. Experiencing his music today remains a powerful spiritual experience that evokes the interplay between worldly toil and the possibility of redemption.

© 2025 Wiebke Thormählen Wiebke Thormählen is Professor of Music and Director of Research at the Royal Northern College of Music. She writes on music’s cultural contexts, performance practice and sound heritage.

Biographies Croatian-born violinist Bojan Čičić has established himself as one of the leading names on the early music scene, as both a soloist and music director.

In addition to being the leader of the Academy of Ancient Music, he directs ensembles including De Nederlandse Bachvereniging, Dunedin Consort, Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra and Phion Orkest van Gelderland & Overijssel. As a soloist he appeared with Academy of Ancient Music, Orchestra of the 18th-Century, Kioi Hall Chamber Orchestra Tokyo and Orquesta Barocca de Sevilla.

Bojan formed his own group, The Illyria Consort, which explores and specialises in lesser-known repertoire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their debut album (Delphian DCD34194) of Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli’s Sonate da camera Nos. 1–6 (DCD34194) achieved great critical acclaim and was chosen as one of Presto Classical’s Recordings of the Year for 2017.

Their collaboration with The Marian Consort,

Adriatic Voyage (DCD34260), won the same award in 2021. The same year saw the release of Pyrotechnia (DCD34278) featuring Italian virtuoso violin concertos by Vivaldi, Tartini and Locatelli was hailed as ‘a thrilling musical discovery’ by Classical Music Daily. In 2022, The Illyria Consort released the first ever complete recording of Johann Jacob Walther: Scherzi da violino solo (DCD34294, ‘enviously spontaneous and carefree’ – Gramophone); and an album of Christmas instrumental music, La Notte (DCD34278; ‘one for every December!’ – BBC Music Magazine).

Bojan’s recent recording of Bach’s Partitas & Sonatas (DCD34300) was nominated as a Gramophone Critic’s Choice 2023, Editor’s Choice in BBC Music Magazine, and a finalist for Presto Classical’s Recordings of the Year.

In 2016, Bojan was appointed Professor of Baroque Violin at the Royal College of Music; he is passionate about training the next generation of instrumentalists in historically informed performing styles.

Elizabeth Kenny is one of Europe’s leading lute players. Her playing has been described as ‘incandescent’ (Music and Vision), ‘radical’ (Independent on Sunday) and ‘indecently beautiful’ (Toronto Post).

Siobhán Armstrong is a performer, academic and teacher exploring historical repertory on reconstructions of medieval to baroque harps.

She has performed and recorded with many of the leading international period-instrument soloists, ensembles and conductors in the field.

Her most recent solo recording, Ars Longa, was Her work also includes solos on Hollywood nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Solo film soundtracks, indigenous Irish music, Instrumental recording of the year 2019. She and contemporary music projects involving has an extensive discography of collaborations historical harps. with chamber ensembles across Europe and the USA. In 2017 Shakespeare Songs, with Siobhán was born in Dublin, and read Music Ian Bostridge and co-collaborators, won the at Trinity College Dublin. On graduation, Grammy best solo vocal recital, and the same she established a harp class at the Schule year together with viol consort Phantasm she für Musik, Theater und Tanz in Stuttgartwon the Gramophone Early Music award for Sindelfingen, Germany. She also studied their recording of Dowland’s Lachrimae. historical harps at the then Akademie für Alte Musik in Bremen, in the early 1990s, before Elizabeth founded Theatre of the Ayre in returning to Ireland.

2007. They have sealed a reputation for an innovative and improvisatory approach to Siobhán is the founding director (2003) of The seventeenth-century music. Notable recording Historical Harp Society of Ireland. In 2015, projects include John Blow’s Venus and Adonis she located a lost historic Irish harp, followed (2011), The Masque of Moments (2017) and by a 2016 commission of the first 3D-laser C17 Playlist, with tenor Ed Lyon (Delphian scan of a musical instrument at the National DCD34220).

Museum of Ireland. Siobhán’s PhD (Middlesex University, 2022) deals with historical evidence Elizabeth has been professor of Lute at the for performance practice surviving in field Royal Academy of Music since 1999, and Dean transcriptions of early Irish harp repertory of Students since 2020. She was Professor notated in the 1790s. In 2021, she was invited of Musical Performance at the University of to be an Occasional Lecturer at University Southampton, and Director of Performance College Dublin, and in 2024 she was appointed and Performance Studies at the University of Historical Harp professor at The Royal College Oxford between 2012 and 2020. of Music, London.

Biographies Steven Devine combines a career as a conductor and director of orchestral, choral and opera repertoire with that of a solo harpsichordist and fortepianist. He is Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the English Haydn Festival; Music Director of New Chamber Opera, Oxford and Director of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s Bach, the Universe & Everything series.

On the concert platform he has directed Purcell, Blow, Bach, Handel and Mozart with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Bach Easter Oratorio with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales; Haydn, Handel, CPE Bach, JC Bach, Ditterdorf and Viotti with the English Haydn Orchestra; Handel, Vivaldi and Porpora with Ann Hallenberg and Trondheim Barokk; Bach Christmas Oratorio with the

Norwegian Wind Ensemble; Handel Solomon with Victoria Baroque Players, British Columbia and Handel Music for the Royal Fireworks with Arion Baroque Ensemble, Montreal. He has also directed programmes with the Academy of Ancient Music, Academie d’Ambronay, the Mozart Festival Orchestra and St Paul’s Chamber Orchestra.

Devine’s opera repertoire includes works by Purcell, Cavalli, Handel, Haydn and Mozart as well as rarities by Galuppi, Salieri and Cimarosa. His recordings include Dido and Aeneas with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Sarah Connolly in the title role; on Delphian he has recently collaborated with Bojan Čičić in recordings of Handel’s Violin Sonatas (DCD34304) and Bach’s Violin Sonatas (DCD34354, forthcoming in 2025).

Bojan Čičić and the Illyria Consort on Delphian Johann Jakob Walther: Scherzi da violino Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

BACH: Partitas & Sonatas BWV 1001–1006 Bojan Čičić violin

DCD34294 (2CDs)

Best Classical Albums of 2022

Presto

Editor’s Choice 2022

DCD34300 (2CDs)

Johann Jakob Walther was one of the most significant violinists in Germany in the generation before J.S. Bach, and Bojan Čičić passionately believes his music deserves to be essential listening for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of Bach’s polyphonic writing for the instrument. This first complete recording displays the sheer ambition of Walther’s opus, with highlights including his demonstration of the violin’s polyphonic potential in the D major sonata (No. III); the joyful playfulness of the end of No. IV; the inventiveness of the Imitatione del cuccu; and – Bojan Čičić’s personal favourite – the dramatic melancholy of the final Aria in E minor.

Presto

Recordings of the Year 2023 Finalist

‘excellent music from a “missing link” composer before Bach, and fabulous playing’ — BBC Radio 3 Record Review, September 2022

Handel: Complete Violin Sonatas Bojan Čičić violin, Steven Devine harpsichord

Best Classical Albums of 2024

Hearing guitarist Sean Shibe’s Bach recital, recorded in Delphian’s fifteenthcentury Scottish venue, Baroque violinist Bojan Čičić was inspired during the first lockdown to begin recording Bach’s iconic Partitas and Sonatas. Amid the gloom of the pandemic and restrictions on performances, Čičić travelled north – when allowed – to explore the intense rigours of Bach’s fugues and shining virtuosity of the Partitas’ fast movements. Dedicated to his late violin professor and with a booklet essay written by Mahan Esfahani, for Bojan Čičić the making of this recording in the snowbound Scottish countryside has been his greatest career highlight – a journey for him from darkness into light. ‘music that engages both heart and head, and leaves us humbled, disarmed, and uplifted’ — The Times, CLASSICAL ALBUM OF THE WEEK, July 2023, FIVE STARS

Pyrotechnia: Fire & Fury from 18th-Century Italy Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

DCD34304

DCD34249

Though better known as a virtuoso keyboard player, as a young man Handel also trained as a violinist. His works for violin and harpsichord, says essayist Donald Burrows, ‘do not attract attention by flashy virtuosity: rather, they are flowing and agreeable chamber music, in which the violinist is in musical conversation with the keyboard player’.

Who better to guide us in this conversation than two early music stars – Bojan Čičić, fresh from acclaimed solo recordings of Bach and Johann Jakob Walther; and Steven Devine, who has known the magnificent 1756 Kirckman harpsichord since boyhood and for whom, he says, it is a privilege and delight to record these Handel Sonatas on it.

Contemporary accounts of the violin playing of Antonio Vivaldi, the ‘Red Priest’, show the extent to which he raised the instrument to hitherto unknown extremes of soloistic virtuosity – able, in its spontaneity and sonorous brilliance, to hold its own against an orchestra in fiery and unforgettably dramatic confrontations. Thanks to Vivaldi’s pupils, eager to imitate the master’s wilder imaginings, several of his improvised cadenzas have been preserved. Here, they inspire typically white-hot performances from Bojan Čičić and The Illyria Consort of four violin concertos by Vivaldi, Tartini and Locatelli which all have movements ending in a ‘capriccio’ – a sequence designed to show that the idea of a virtuosic display cadenza, usually associated with the classical concerto of a later period, had already developed during the first half of the eighteenth century.

‘affectionate insight, improvisatory flair and technical aplomb’ — BBC Music Magazine, April 2023, FIVE STARS

Presto

Editor’s Choice

‘Čičić’s approach – sensitive and fluid, while never less than technically immaculate – shows these unashamedly swaggering pieces in all their ostentatious magnificence’ — Presto Music, October 2021

Bojan Čičić and the Illyria Consort on Delphian Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli (1694–1773): Sonate da Camera Nos 1–6 Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

Giovanni Giornovich: ‘London’ Concertos Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

DCD34194

Presto

Recordings of the Year 2017 Winner

Presto

Editor’s Choice

In certain respects, Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli does not fit the eighteenthcentury mould. For a neo-Corellian, he is unusually fond of complexity, both technical and compositional, and also unusually open to other contemporary influences, such as those of Handel and Vivaldi. But the quality of his music speaks for itself – virtuosic and joyously melodic, these six ‘chamber sonatas’ had a huge impact on release. Carbonelli’s difficulty has ensured that his work is seldom played, but early-music rising star Bojan Čičić makes sure we have no sense of that as he and his Illyria Consort colleagues champion these groundbreaking compositions with exuberant confidence.

DCD34219

Presto

Editor’s Choice

Giovanni Giornovich was one of the most colourful and popular violin virtuosos of his day. Apparently of Croatian descent, he was seemingly known by a different name in every country he toured (Ivan Jarnović and Giovanni Giornovichi, among some thirty variants), deliberately making the most of his mysterious origins. More mysterious still is why these concertos – full of wit, charm and character, and redolent of the international musical life of Haydn’s London in the 1790s – should have waited so long to be recorded. Modern-day virtuoso Bojan Čičić and his Illyria Consort, fresh from their triumphant revival of the sonatas of Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli on Delphian, are ideal champions to bring this delightful music back to life.

‘superb and passionate … Čičić’s sound – sweet, slightly dry and exquisitely centred – is ideal for the taut beauty of Carbonelli’s solo lines’ — BBC Music Magazine, September 2017, CHAMBER CHOICE

‘a glimpse of a lost performing world and its forgotten music … Čičić is a clean and assured soloist’ — Gramophone, May 2019

Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli: Sonate da Camera Nos 7–12 Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

La Notte: Concertos & Pastorales for Christmas Night Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

DCD34214

DCD34278

With their debut recording on Delphian, Bojan Čičić and his Illyria Consort propelled the name of Carbonelli from obscurity into the classical charts, recapturing the excitement which the violinist-composer stirred up in eighteenth-century London. Now they bring to Carbonelli’s other six surviving sonatas the same intelligence, sensitivity and sheer, exhilarating virtuosic brilliance with which they proved him to be so much more than just a ‘follower of Corelli’ or ‘contemporary of Vivaldi’. For good measure they add in a fine concerto by the latter that bears Carbonelli’s name, demonstrating the respect in which he was held in his native Italy before setting off to find his fame and fortune in England.

Bojan Čičić and the Illyria Consort’s latest Delphian recording revels in the great variety of musical styles and traditions that grew up around Christmas and its related feasts in Catholic Europe in the seventeenth century – a time when the introduction of ‘rustic’ effects into instrumental music changed the sound of Christmas forever. The vivid theatricality of Baroque evocations of the shepherds and their milieu and the unusual combinations of instruments in much of this music, here given in performances brimming with energy and the joy of rediscovery, make this a Christmas album to reach for every year.

‘crisp and buoyant, with the engineering giving a bright, ear-grabbing immediacy to the sound … Čičić is as much a joy as last time for his superlative virtuoso technique and energetic poetry’ — Gramophone, September 2019

Presto

Editor’s Choice

‘The whole album sparkles; it’s a veritable box of delights’ — Presto Classical, November 2022

DCD34334