Elizabeth
Wallfisch (Elizabeth Coates Hunt Wallfisch) is an Australian violinist,
teacher, author, and conductor born (in Melbourne, Australia) on January 28,
1952. The greater part of her career has
been spent outside of Australia. Together
with Simon Standage, Fabio Biondi, Andrew Manze, Giuliano Carmignola, Rachel Podger,
and Enrico Onofri, she is one of the better-known proponents of historical
baroque performance practice, a movement which started in the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, besides playing on baroque (period)
violins, Wallfisch also gives concerts on modern instruments. (The photo shows her holding a baroque
violin.) One of her many recordings is
the one featuring the rarely-heard Rosary Sonatas by Heinrich Biber. Another is the Opus 3 concertos (published in
1733) by Pietro Locatelli. Although she began studying piano at age 4, she did
not begin violin lessons until age 10, a rather late age at which to start by
traditional standards. I do not know who
her first violin teachers were. At 18,
she moved to Germany then proceeded to London where she studied at the Royal Academy
of Music with Frederick Grinke. At about
age 23, her professional career began in England with the London Mozart Players
and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Up
to about her mid-twenties, her education had been entirely founded on
traditional modern performance techniques on modern violins. Her switch to baroque (historical) approaches
took place almost by accident. Among the
many ensembles she has led and performed with are the Hanover Band, the
Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Les
Musiciens Du Louvre, the Raglan Baroque Players, the Orchestra of the Age of
Enlightenment, Tafelmusik, the Israel Chamber Orchestra, and the St Paul
Chamber Orchestra. In 1989, she
co-founded the Locatelli Trio. In 2008,
she founded the Wallfisch Band, a baroque ensemble that allows for
apprenticeships for young players alongside the core orchestra members –
personnel changes are made on an on-going basis. Wallfisch has held teaching positions at the
Royal Academy of Music (London), the Royal Conservatory at The Hague, and at
the University of Melbourne. She has
been concertmaster at the Carmel Bach Festival (California, U.S.) for over
twenty years. Among the recording labels
featuring her are Virgin Classics, Hyperion, and Chandos - they are easy to find on the internet. As far as I could determine, Wallfisch plays
a violin by Petrus Paulus (Pietro Paolo) de Vitor (of Brescia) from about 1750. Here is one YouTube audio file of Wallfisch
playing several Bach concertos. Here is
a short video by the Wallfisch Band playing Telemann.
Heinrich Biber (Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern) was a Czech (some
would say Austrian) violinist and composer born (in Wartenberg) on a date
unknown but probably in July or August of 1644.
Although he was a virtuosic violinist and highly regarded in his day for
his skill in playing the violin, he is today better known as a composer. One source states that he seldom (if ever)
toured as a concert violinist. He was in
the employ of the nobility and wrote music, both secular and sacred, for
them. He was even ascended to the
nobility (1690 - at about age 45) by one of his employers. Just as Bach, Vivaldi, Zelenka, and a few
other Baroque composers lost favor and remained obscure during a time span of
one hundred years or more but were re-discovered, Biber and his music enjoyed a renaissance in the
late 1900s. This was due mainly to the
discovery of a brilliant set of violin sonatas known as the Mystery Sonatas or
the Rosary Sonatas. The set is comprised
of 15 works plus a Passacaglia attached to the end as number 16. There are quite a number of recordings of the
Sonatas, just as there are dozens of recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Biber is said to be one of the most important
composers of violin music – just as are Locatelli, Corelli, Vivaldi, Tartini,
Paganini, Spohr, Viotti, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, Sarasate, and a few
others. Little is known of his early
life. He did work at various courts from
an early age. Eventually he ended up
spending the bulk of his career in Salzburg – from the year 1670 onward;
playing, conducting, and composing for Maximilian Gandolph, Archbishop of
Salzburg. This was about 90 years before
Mozart’s time. Biber first published his
works in 1676. He was 32 years old. In 1679, he became assistant music director
and in 1684, he was appointed music director.
Today, his most popular and best-known work consists of the Mystery
Sonatas, although they were not published during Biber’s lifetime. If he played these sonatas himself, he must
have been an extraordinary violinist because they are riddled with
difficulties. In addition, all of the
sonatas require that the violin be tuned other than in the usual fifths – only
the Passacaglia is played with normal tuning.
Biber composed much music for choir and orchestra as well as other
instrumental works, some of it quite exploratory or experimental in
nature. A piece entitled The Battle
(that’s the abbreviated title) makes use of effects which would not again see
the light of day until more than two hundred years later – extreme polytonality,
imitations of drums, imitations of canon fire, unusual harmonic progressions,
and insertion of extraneous objects into instruments to change their texture. Here is part one of a YouTube video of a
performance of the piece. Here is part
two of the same performance. This is
part one of a partita (Partia) for six players in seven movements. This is part two of the same partita. And finally, eight of the famous Mystery
Sonatas can be found here. About one
minute and 15 seconds into the Praeludium of Sonata number one you may think
you hear a striking resemblance to the main melody in the second movement of
Saint Saens’ first piano concerto but that is probably just a striking
coincidence. Similarly, Sonata number 15
contains a tiny portion which somewhat resembles the theme of Paganini’s
twenty-fourth Caprice. Biber died on May
3, 1704, at age 59.
