This is where the story of the virtuoso and the solo violin begins, somewhere around the last quarter of the Seventeenth Century. Biber, an exceptional violinist himself, composed this cycle of fifteen sonatas for solo violin and basso continuo as meditations on the Mysteries in the life of the Virgin Mary. In addition these sonatas occupy a unique place in the entire history of music for being the most extreme example of the application of scordatura where for each sonata the strings are mistuned to unusual notes. This makes live performance extremely difficult as the violin must be re-tuned between sonatas. To cover this pause Ruth Padel has created a series of poems to read out while Ariadne Daskalakis re-tunes her violin. This series of three performances will open with the Passacaglia leading directly to the first sonata, the Annunciation.
