Otto Heinrich Warburg

A more radiant and gratifyingly robust collection of baroque instrumental works would be hard to imagine. Dedicated to Biber’s patron, Maximilian Gandolph, in the 1676 publication, these 12 sonatas (which broadly translate as ‘sonatas suitable for altar or court’) juxtapose pieces for a rich five- or six-part string palette – pursuing an exhilarating, intensely-wrought, sophisticated and unpredictable musical rhetoric – with quasi-concerted and swaggering trumpets. The two are not mutually exclusive since Biber wrote Sonata VI for a solo trumpet in G minor, a work which stretches the capability of the ‘natural’ instrument and coaxes it into the poignant and refined world of early Italian canzonas.