There's a reason why art historians call the seventeenth and early eighteenth century the Baroque period: it's characterized by wildly imaginative, fantastically colored and extravagantly expressive art. In the art of German Baroque music of the later seventeenth century, there was no violinist more wild, fantastic, and extravagant than Heinrich Ignaz von Biber. A consummate virtuoso's music, Biber's violin works never completely fell into oblivion simply because consummate virtuosos kept it alive if only for its novelty value as an encore. In this 1987 recording by consummate virtuoso
Reinhard Goebel, Biber's Mensa sonora comes tastefully to life while his Sonatina representativa comes vulgarly to life. Intended as table music to be played as an aural backdrop for a feast, the Mensa sonora is a delectable sequence of movements full of airy melodies, light harmonies, and effervescent rhythms that
Goebel and the
Musica Antiqua Köln dispatch with gusto. Intended as a depiction of various animals as an entertainment at a party, the Sonatina representiativa is, depending on your point of view, either a delightful or simply silly series of movements full of some of the rudest sounds ever to come out of a stringed instrument that
Goebel fearlessly produces with panache all by himself. Archiv's early digital sound was crisp and clean in its time, and this reissue is just as clean and perhaps even crisper.