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GRAMOPHONE (11/2016)
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Reviewer: Fabrice Fitch

Recordings of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas have been appearing at a steady rate (once a year on average) over the last 20 years, and this new set from Hélène Schmitt is an intriguing if puzzling addition. Schmitt’s continuo line-up is relatively generous but homogeneously constituted: it consists of a theorbo, claviorganum, viola da gamba and violone – not all of them used at the same time. So, like most performers nowadays, she uses a bowed bass on the continuo, despite the absence of evidence for its use in Biber’s time. That said, there’s little of the chopping and changing within individual sonatas that has characterised (and sometimes marred) other accounts.

Schmitt’s reflections on performing the cycle are evocative and informative (and it’s worth adding that the accompanying essay by the noted scholar Peter Wollny is equally  intriguing, proposing among other things a later date for the set’s compilation than has generally been accepted). That said, the tempi chosen throughout are far slower than the norm, in fact slower than any previous recording as far as I can te ll. In the concluding Passacaglia this is not so noticeable, but elsewhere Schmitt will linger or pause on individual moments, which further obstructs the flow of the narrative or the individual line. All of this certainly presents the cycle in a different light, though other more concrete details are frankly disconcerting: the articulation of the Gigue for ‘The Crowning of Jesus with Thorns’ does little to suggest mockery or sarcasm; the metronomic approach to the variation of the set’s very last Sarabande has none of the graceful saltando familiar from other interpretations; and, in the principal section of the sonata for ‘The Resurrection’, several bizarre editorial decisions misquote the tune being quoted in the violin part, nullify its imitation with the bass and result in consecutives into the bargain. From an artist of this experience it’s very surprising. Above all, one misses the casual overcoming of difficulty, the sprezzatura that is the hallmark of so much instrumental music of this period, and with which Biber must surely have captivated his audiences.
 

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