From Biber’s famous ‘Guardian Angel’ Passacaglia to Guillemain’s ‘Amusements’ and sonatas and fantasias by Matteis (father and son), Pisendel and Vilsmayr, Isabelle Faust offers us a panorama of European music for unaccompanied violin from the second half of the Baroque era. Dreamy or virtuosic, these pieces bear witness to the diversity of inspirations from Italy, France, England and the German-speaking countries - and to their marvellous intermingling echoes.

The 17th-century Austrian composer Heinrich Biber is remembered today for his extraordinary solo violin music–collections such as the Mystery Sonatas. He wrote a number of large-scale instrumental works and choral pieces as well, but their reputation is not as high. They include a lot of grand gestures for brass, but they tend to be harmonically static and often seem long-winded. So Konrad Junghänel and his superb musicians have really achieved something by making the works on this disc sound so appealing.

Johann Sebastian Bach, the newly appointed Cantor of the Thomaskirche, undertook his first official journey from Leipzig to nearby Störmthal in 1723, where he and his Thomanerchor inaugurated the beautiful new organ built by Zacharias Hildebrandt, a pupil of Silbermann. Bach was thrilled by the instrument’s splendid timbres and tonal beauty. A particularly beautiful violin was made by the German luthier David Tecchler in Rome — 1400 km from Störmthal — during that same year. Both instruments have survived and have been excellently restored; now, three hundred years after their creation, they meet for the first time.

Biber's 15 Mystery Sonatas with their additional Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin were written in about 1678 and dedicated to his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg. Each Sonata is inspired by a section of the Rosary devotion of the Catholic Church which offered a system of meditation on 15 Mysteries from the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The music isn't, strictly speaking, programmatic, though often vividly illustrative of events which took place in the life of Christ.

The technology at our command, the electronic images we see every day, the ease and swiftness of world travel and communication has left modern humans with a waning sense of awe. We can argue about who was or is better off, but for 17th century Europeans, awe-inspiring events happened with some regularity. Pageantry was one of the more effective and popular means to impress a congregation, and there was nothing like a huge celebration in a massive cathedral to remind each person of his place in the grand scheme.

The present recording brings together various examples of night music from the European tradition and constitutes a kaleidoscope refracting the manifold facets of night. In tells of brilliant celebrations, nocturnal love dramas and desires, tender lullabies, ghosts, birds of the night and the most holy of nights. It is Antonio Vivaldi's music that is pivotal to our recording. Providing a bridge between his works and functioning as interludes are songs, diminutions, motets, madrigals, sommeils and chaconnes from Spai, the Netherlands, France, England, Italy, Germany and Austria.

The young Czech soprano Hana Bla íkóva is currently one of the most exciting voices in the baroque scene today. After receiving her final diploma at the Conservatory of her native city Prague in 2002, the singer very rapidly gained an excellent reputation as a baroque interpreter. Conductors such as Philippe Herreweghe, Masaaki Suzuki and Vaclav Luks frequently invite her for CD recordings, concerts and tours. She regularly appears at renowned festivals including Prague Spring, Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht, Resonances in Vienna and the Early Music Days in Regensburg.

This plunge into the steady stream of Biber releases comes from violinist Anton Steck, an alumnus of the Musica Antiqua Köln period-instrument group. Austria's Heinrich Ignaz von Biber was a brilliant, iconoclastic violinist and composer of the late seventeenth century, hardly known 25 years ago but now the recipient of attention from violinists and casual listeners alike. His Mystery Sonatas collectively depict the Passion story through the unique device of scordatura, or retuning of the violin, which forces the instrument into strange, unearthly textures and moods.

The music on this disc is about sonority, about the brilliance of trumpets and strings in a live, reverberant acoustic such as that of Salzburg cathedral, for which at least some of these works were conceived. And Andrew Manze and his English Concert unequivocally deliver (albeit in the less-opulent confines of London’s Temple Church), from the opening fanfare through the vibrant, tuneful, richly scored sonatas that periodically spice this thoughtfully organized program. The featured work is a Mass, the Missa Christi Resurgentis, likely written for Easter in 1764. It’s a lavish celebration scored for two four-part choirs, an added bass singer, plus two instrumental ensembles, designed to be performed antiphonally in a grand display.

Like many of his German and Austrian contemporaries, Bohemian-born composer Heinrich von Biber was strongly influenced by the Italian school of violin composition that included Biagio Marini (1587-1665) and Marco Uccellini (1603-1680). A noted virtuoso himself, Biber and his teacher Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1621-1680) were two of the most important figures of the late seventeenth-century Viennese violin style. Biber's keen understanding of the technical and expressive possibilities of the instrument is evident in his innovative use of pizzicato (plucking of the string with the finger), double and triple stops (more than one note played at once creating "chords"), col legno (stick of the bow on the string), sul ponticello (played close to the bridge), and, especially, scordatura (intentional "mistuning" of the strings). Scordatura allowed the performer to play chords in particular keys more easily, extended the range of notes, and provided more open strings in order to negotiate the difficulty of polyphonic writing for a single instrument. Biber's imaginative and original use of these techniques or special effects brought violin virtuosity to an entirely new level of musical expression in the Baroque period. It can be argued that J. S. Bach's masterful Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, written in 1720, are direct descendants of Biber's grounding breaking Mystery or Rosary Sonatas, composed nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

A large collection of religious works by two Austrian composers. Bieber's work for 36 voices is a powerful and moving piece, especially for cornets, trumpets, sackbuts and timpani bursts. Here, Junghaner is in charge of the Viennese early music group and Concerto Palatino, who has the best technique and expressiveness in the early music brass system, also contributes to this wonderful performance. It was performed in the mass format at the time, and is recorded with a sonata in front and behind. [Sony Music]

2009 release from L'Arpeggiata, the French-based ensemble directed by Austrian-born harpist and lutenist Christina Pluhar. L'Arpeggiata has made a speciality of exploring and exploiting the close links between Baroque repertoire and the traditional music of the Latin world and its characteristic forms such as the tarantella, the folia or the canario. On Via Crucis, 'the way of the Cross', the focus is on the pervasive presence of religious feeling in Southern Europe. The Passion of Christ evokes the same fervour in composers such as Giovanni Felice Sances (1600-1679) or Tarquinio Merula (1594-1665) - both active in northern Italy – as it does in the streets of Naples or the villages of Corsica. The two main works in the collection are Sance's extraordinary Stabat Mater and Merula's Hor ch'e tempo di dormire, in which the Virgin Mary lulls her baby to sleep while weeping for his future suffering and both enthrall the listener with a basso ostinato and hypnotic swaying rhythms.

With the flood of recordings devoted to the freethinking Salzburg Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, it is not surprising that his predecessor as Salzburg music director, Andreas Hofer, has been resurrected. There is nothing here to rival Biber's outlandish and fascinating programmatic ideas; Hofer's sacred music, as represented on this disc, falls much closer to the Venetian-derived German mainstream inherited from Schütz. That said, this is an ideal purchase for anyone who likes Schütz, Biber, or the south German Baroque in general. The album reproduces a hypothetical Vespers service of the area, featuring the music Hofer, as kapellmeister, might have drawn together for a festive event – mostly his own, but also including works by Biber, Giovanni Valentini, and Johann Baptist Dolar.

This commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the death of Biber is subtitled ‘In the midst of life we are in death’ and divided into ‘Vita’ and ‘Mors’. The ‘Life’ section consists of the Mass interspersed with all but two of the pieces by other composers listed above; ‘Death’ wraps the Praeludium and Lassus’s Media vita… round the Requiem.