Customer Reviews

Mensa Sonora: Biber and His Contemporaries

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When I first listened to this collection of 17th-century pieces I didn't read the booklet notes but simply drank in the wonderful sounds. I was thinking that it was a little gauche of me to be doing something else at the time the CD was playing. In fact, I was preparing and eating my breakfast. Only when I read the booklet notes did I learn the meaning of the CD's title -- 'Mensa Sonora' -- namely 'Sonorous Table', roughly the same as 'Tafelmusik', 'table music', music to be heard while one was eating. Nice coincidence, I thought, but I still felt a little guilty at not giving the music my full attention. Reading further, though, my guilt was relieved. Clearly the composers of this music knew the function of the music and no matter that it is expertly written (and played here): still it is meant for casual enjoyment, not the studious attention expected of, say, 19th- and 20th-century music. But since I knew I was going to be writing a review, I decided I really owed it to the music and to the performers to listen carefully. I'm glad I did. This is lovely music, yes, but it also exemplifies typically neat Baroque craft; that is particularly true for the music of Heinrich Biber, two of whose string sonatas and the third and sixth partitas from his eponymous 'Mensa Sonora' are included here (as well as a solo violin passacaglia from the justly celebrated 'Rosary Sonatas', works that have burst upon the scene with multiple recordings in the past few years).

The other works here, all of a piece with the Biber, are by even less familiar composers, all born within a generation of each other in the early 1600s: Georg Muffat, Johann Michael Nicolai, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Augustinus Kertzinger. All of it is for combinations of string instruments -- violins, violas da gamba and continuo of positif organ or harpsichord. The performances by the expert Montréal early music group, Masques, are brisk, stylistically apt, precisely articulated and entirely engaging.

Highlights for me are Biber's two Sonatas, his two 'Mensa Sonora' partitas and the solo violin passacaglia (the CD's haunting last track played gorgeously by Sophie Gent); also the viola da gamba trio by Nicolai (three violas da gamba, making a sensuously luscious sound as played by Elin Söderström, Mélisande Corriveau and Josh Cheatham). But the whole thing is worth every penny and I'll wager that if you get it you'll find yourself playing it again and again. It's that enjoyable.

Scott Morrison