Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber

No one quite embraced the supersized grand ceremonial like Heinrich Biber. His motet Plaudite tympana, a companion piece to the equally mammoth Missa Salisburgensis, is written in 54 vocal and instrumental parts. It’s a far cry indeed from the concluding movement of his Rosary Sonatas (also known as the Mystery Sonatas) which achieves its profound intensity through a single unaccompanied violin. Born in 1644 in the Bohemian town of Stráž pod Ralskem (then called Wartenberg), Biber cut his musical teeth working in Graz and Kromeríž where his skill as a violinist quickly attracted attention. But after being headhunted for the Archbishop of Salzburg’s musical entourage in 1670, Biber stayed in the Austrian city for the rest of his life. Publications of chamber music initiated by the set Sonatae tam aris quam aulis servientes (Sonatas as much for the altar as for the table, 1676) secured his reputation, and its sheer range testifies to Biber’s gifts for free-wheeling caprice, exuberant virtuosity and contrapuntal dexterity. Working his way up to become Salzburg Cathedral’s director of music in 1684, Biber wrote sacred music that exploits the building’s four choir lofts and spacious acoustic. But a secular playfulness is apparent, too, in a clutch of ground-breaking descriptive pieces such as the Sonata representativa with its bird songs and croaking frog, or the drunken carousing in Battalia (1673), a notably graphic depiction of warfare. Ennobled in 1690, he died in 1704, Salzburg’s most illustrious musical son until the birth, some half-century later, of one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.