When Rachel Podger was recording Biber’s Rosary (Mystery) Sonatas at the church of St Jude-on-the-Hill, London, in January 2015, she started to notice her violin playing up. The tailgut – the thick piece of gut connecting the tailpiece to the button on the bottom side of the instrument – started to fray and look dangerously worn. Cue a quick trip to a luthier, and the tailgut was replaced mid-recording. This set of 16 sonatas dating from the1670s are best known for their extensive use of scordatura, and such extreme detunings of the usual G–D–A–E configuration test the violin’s physicality. Indeed, Rachel Podger’s Gramophone Award-winning recording (with David Miller, Marcin Świątkiewicz and Jonathan Manson; Channel Classics, 10/15) is an excellent starting point for the mysterious set, particularly her Sonata No 10, ‘The Crucifixion’ – gnarly and grotesque in all the right places.

Amandine Beyer’s recent release of the Biber also offers a well-honed interpretation (Harmonia Mundi, 3/23). Her more airborne take on ‘The Crucifixion’ – pungent and prickly in excellent measure – bears signs of her longtime collaboration with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her dance company Rosas.

Venture a bit further from Biber’s famous Rosary Sonatas, and you’ll find even weirder harmonic universes. The Sonata seconda d’inventione per il violino, the 57th piece in Biagio Marini’s Op 8 set (Venice, 1626-29), instructs the violinist to retune mid-movement: during a seven-bar rest, the player is to lower the top string to a C (‘Qui si accorda il Cantino in terza minore’). Monica Huggett’s 1999 recording (for Stradivarius), supported by Galatea, is wonderfully doleful. The scordatura section is palpably distingushed from the norm, with the violin becoming nasal, almost trombone-like.

Our homework is done for us with the album ‘L’arte della scordatura: Violin Works from Biber to Tartini’ (Passacaille), recorded in 2019 by Mayumi Hirasaki et al. Unknown to me was Tartini’s three-movement Pastorale (c1731), which employs a scordatura of A–E–A–E. Here the violin is cast as something tighter, clenched and ready to jig.

A similar bright, timbral tightness occurs in Johannes Pramsohler and his Ensemble Diderot’s premiere recording of Violin Concerto No 3 in F by the little-known early 18th-century composer Johann Jakob Kress (Audax, recorded 2022). Here the solo violin is tuned a semitone higher, playing in the key of E while the ensemble remains in F. The scordatura functions as a natural spotlight, with Pramsohler wondrously illuminated – wiry but warm.

This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of Gramophone magazine, and we have similar musical journeys in every issue. So, never miss an issue – subscribe today