Boston Baroque: Biber’s Mystery Sonatas

July 11, 2018, 9:00 am

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Heinrich Biber’s astonishingly powerful and deeply emotional Mystery Sonatas represent a triumph of Baroque invention. The adventurous use of six baroque violins in fifteen different tunings creates otherworldly soundscapes that result in a deeply moving and glorious listening experience. This highly disorientating practice reaches its pinnacle in Sonata XI (The Resurrection) where the middle two strings are crossed over each other both in the peg box and behind the bridge, so that one can literally see a cross on the violin. Boston Classical Review described Christina Day Martinson’s live performance as “a flourish of technical complexity and musical wizardry.”