The music of Austrian Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644-1704) is exploding in popularity. Will it be as familiar as that of Bach in 20 or 30 years? Some of it is jaw-dropping enough to make you wonder. Consider some of the music on the Soldiers, Gypsies, Farmers and a Night Watchman album, which as the title suggests is made up of programmatic selections. The Battalia follows in a long tradition of musical representations of battle, but that statement hardly does it justice. Using only a small string ensemble, Biber has his soldiers enter the field, sing their various songs in a simultaneous jumble that sounds like nothing so much as
Charles Ives, march forward with drums sounding (a double bass is modified with a piece of cardboard to produce a buzzing sound like a drum roll), clash violently with the enemy, and finally mourn their dead. Equally unusual is the Sonata a 6, "Die Pauernkirchfahrt genandt" (Sonata for Six Instruments, known as "The Farmers on the Way to Church") is hardly less unusual, with a chorale-like melody woven into walking music; if you've wondered whether there were a musical equivalent to the northern European tradition of genre painting, well, here it is. The Serenada a 5 "mit dem Nachtwächterlied" (Serenade for Five Instruments, with the Night Watchman's Song) contains a section in which an actual vocalist materializes out of nowhere, singing the texts of what were apparently actual Salzburg night-watchman calls. Other pieces incorporate Bohemian folk rhythms and melodies, another idea seemingly hundreds of years ahead of its time.
The
Combattimento Consort Amsterdam performs all this music to the hilt, with a terrific feel for Biber's sense of humor. The stolid German farmers seem to lag slightly as they walk along in the organ accompaniment of
Pieter Dirksen, and
Jan Willem de Vriend performs ably in Biber's dual role of violinist and leader. If there is a questionable decision here, it is the inclusion of an unscored dulcimer in the Czech-flavored pieces; the continuo of a seventeeenth century piece is a flexible unit, it's true, but this seems to hammer the point home (no pun intended) rather than letting it subtly dawn. Another problem is that the liner notes are subpar; they seem to have been poorly coordinated with the disc itself, referring to an ordering different from what actually appears on the disc and omitting mention of several pieces altogether. One work, the Balletto "Die Werber," seems to have frustrated the translators; the word "Werber" has several possible translations, and although English translations are given for other titles, this one is left untranslated. But really there is little to complain about here. The listener is invited to apply his or her imagination to the undiscussed pieces, which are as vivid and variegated as the rest of the music, and the disc as a whole is just about as entertaining and downright amazing as one could wish.