• Claire Tomlin soprano
• Janet Bullard alto
• Patrick McCarthy tenor
• Eamonn Dougan bass
• Psalmody
• members of Essex Baroque Orchestra
• directed by Peter Holman

The music of Heinrich Biber (1644-1704) has been featured in several SVF concerts in recent years. We performed his monumental Missa Salisburgensis in 2000, and several concerts during the 2004 Festival marked the 300th anniversary of his death.

For this year’s Christmas concert we perform a sequence of vesper psalms and a Magnificat richly scored for solo voices, choir and five-part strings. They come from a collection published by Biber in 1693, when he was director of music at the Salzburg court and was writing regularly for Salzburg Cathedral.

As would have happened at the time, the psalms are interspersed with motets, hymns, pastorellas and instrumental pieces appropriate to the Christmas season by Biber’s Austrian and south German contemporaries, including Johann Stadlmayr, Giovanni Valentini, Antonio Bertali, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Rupert Ignaz Mayr and Johann Christian Pez.