Lecture Biber Festival
Lecture on Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber by Stef Grondelaers.
You may have thought that Johann Sebastian Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin marked the beginning of an independent violin language, and that programmatic music had its big breakthrough with Antonio Vivaldi and The Four Seasons. But much of what we associate with Bach and Vivaldi had already been brought to a peak several decades earlier by the Austrian composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704). Biber was at least as innovative in his day as his more famous contemporaries, yet he remained under the radar for a long time. In this lecture, we explore how that is possible and hear how Biber, as an Austrian, moves between two musical worlds: nourished by Italian expressiveness and virtuosity, but at the same time shaped by the polyphonic rigour of the North German tradition. This tension resulted in music of enormous imagination, theatrical intensity and spiritual depth, in which the violin was given an unprecedented central and innovative role.
Â
Â
Musicians
- Stef Grondelaers speaker
