Barefoot Chamber Concerts (“an enterprise noted for both its quality and informality” – San Francisco Classical Voice) presents really good music in the right acoustic and without the formality of most classical music events.
David Wilson, the Bay Area’s primo Biber Wizard, brings us the second part of his series of H. I. F. Biber’s extraordinary “Rosary Sonatas” (aka “Mystery Sonatas”; the title page is missing, so nobody knows what Biber meant to call them, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of musicologists spending a lot of time learnedly speculating about it). This time it’s the “Sorrowful Mysteries”, as Biber called them. David has assembled an all-star continuo cast (Barbara Blaker Krumdieck, cello; and Katherine Heater, harpsichord) each bringing their own virtuosic abilities to the party.
Biber was way ahead of Joni Mitchell in inventing radical new tunings, and although he didn’t invent as many as Ms. Mitchell, he did also invent radically new violin techniques, which apparently only he could play (that was then; David has caught up with him, clearly). Prepare to be amazed.