Baroque Innovations

Vesa-Matti Leppänen and musicians from the NZSO string section present a scintillating Baroque rarity: Heinrich Ignaz Biber’s Harmonia artificiosa.

The 17th-century composer Biber was also a violinist, and a darn good one. With lefthand and bowing techniques that far outstripped that of his Italian contemporaries, his works for strings reflected his virtuosic violin playing. Nowadays Biber is most often associated with scordatura – that is, tuning an instrument’s strings to notes other than the norm. His Harmonia artificiosa (1696) consists of seven partitas, six of which require unusual tunings and consequently lead to extraordinarily complex harmonies and polyphonic effects. Grab your chance to hear this monumental work by a seventeenth-century maverick.