"Robert Maxham's review, in your January/February issue, of the Purcell Quartet's recording of Biber's Harmonia Artificiosa-Ariosa contains an extraordinary mistake; he states that Maria Lindal and Ensemble Saga, who recently recorded some Biber on the BIS label, play on modern instruments.

"As the BIS CD booklet states, they play period-style instruments ('The historical instruments that they play, with their typical timbres and dynamics...'), and both Maria Lindal's and the second violinist's (Barry Sargent's) biographies explain that they studied Baroque violin. Furthermore, every member of the ensemble is well known as an early music specialist to anyone with any knowledge of today's early music performers.

"If Mr. Maxham did not have the benefit of the booklet, just listening to the CD should have demonstrated that Baroque-style instruments were being used by Ensemble Saga. If Mr. Maxham cannot hear the difference between modern instruments and Baroque-style instruments, perhaps he should not be reviewing authentic Baroque music discs."

Christopher Price
223 Lilyfield Road
Lilyfield NWS 2040
Australia

"Confitebor. I apologize to the Ensemble Saga, to BIS, to Joel Flegler, and to Christopher Price and any other Fanfare readers who may have taken exception to, or been misled by, my reference to Ensemble Saga's Biber (BIS-CD-608) as a 'modern instrument' performance. I made that reference in a review of the Purcell Quartet (Fanfare 18:3, pp. 122-23). But it was I, too, who reviewed the Ensemble Saga recording in question (Fanfare 17:5, pp. 166-7), and in that review, I didn't even suggest that the Ensemble was playing on modern instruments; in fact, I mentioned there that Biber was becoming the exclusive domain of period instrumentalists. I'd like to explain how these period instruments mysteriously metamorphosed into modern ones between the reviews.

"Although I don't make use of the information in CD booklets in my research, when I was preparing my review of the Ensemble Saga, I did note in the booklet that Maria Lindal's violin was an 1852 Maggini coy of Vuillaume. Since her instrument sounded rather modern to me, and since not enough of the violin was visible in the photograph to show how it was fit out (beyond Maggini's signature double purfling), I decided to check Ernest N. Doring's 1961 list of known Vuillaumes to see whether that instrument--or any of Vuillaume's other Maggini copies--had been set up by Vuillaume himself with the 'Baroque' short neck and short, slender bass bar. Ms. Lindal's violin itself didn't appear in that list (I found only seven Maggini copies, none of them from 1852). Neither could I find, in Harvey S. Whistler and Doring's monograph or in Roger Millant's book on Vuillaume (J. B. Vuillaume: Sa Vie et son Oeuvre), photos of any other short-necked Vuillaume copies of Amati, da Salo, or Maggini violins. Like my own Vuillaume Strad copy from 1839, many had been made to look like renecked originals (Vuillaume was, after all, attempting to produce nearly indistinguishable copies of prototypes that had themselves been renecked). Vuillaume submitted one of his Maggini copies for the Paris Great Exhibition of 1855, three years after he supposedly made Lindal's violin. The Grand Jury, which included Halévy, Berlioz, and Fétis, found its tone appropriately Maggianian: 'veiled' and 'melancholy.' This judgement is echoed by my own characterization of Lindal's violin as 'dark' in timbre. Since my original search didn't reveal any Vuillaume Maggini copies with 'Baroque' fittings, and since few owners of Vuillaumes would be likely to retrofit them nowadays, given their recent rise in value, I conjectured that Lindal's violin was basically a modern one but with gut strings. I guessed that's what it was, but I didn't say so. Since the issue seemed secondary in the review, I simply didn't mention the violin's maker, as I ordinarily do, lest I open a discussion there was no room and no way to conclude.

"Gunar Letzbor, concertmaster of the Vienna Academy of Original Instruments, performed Bach's A-Minor Violin Concerto with the ensemble here in Ames, Iowa recently on a 'classically fitted' instrument (longer neck, gut strings, etc.). There can be a striking contrast indeed between the kinds of instruments hard-core authenticists and practical musicians approve.

"And, in addition to the range of 'authentic' instruments, there's the continuum of 'authentic' performers themselves, extending from those who garnish a line with a few ornaments to those who season scholarly awareness more heavily with creative imagination. In my review of the Ensemble Saga, I singled out Lindal's unaccompanied Biber as the recording's most convincing performance. Yet her thoroughly sympathetic approach to the passacaglia, although historically informed, is markedly different from the wild but hardly wooly Andrew Manze's (Harmonia Mundi France 900713435 -- Fanfare 18:4, pp. 134-135, where I expressed my preference for Lindal) -- or from those of any of the period instrument folk I've heard perform it. It's closer, in fact, to the straightforward Suzanne Lautenbacher reading (on LP, Vox SVBX-552) than to recent, more idiosyncratic ones.

"Since writing the review of the Ensemble Saga recording, I've returned to the disc only for the passacaglia. Fascinated by the timbre of the violin and the style of the playing, I even used the performance as a lecture example of a more traditional, rather than a more stylized ('authentic'), approach to the German polyphonic violin writing (Biber to Bach). I was concerned in that discussion with such aspects of technique as the length and weight of rapid detache strokes and patterns of breaking chords. Shortly thereafter, in writing my review of the Purcell Quartet, I was seduced by a synecdoche, remembering the part as the whole, and making, under the spell, the reference to the Ensemble Saga's instruments as modern, which, except for Lindal's, about which I've now made my conjectures public, they certainly are not.

"Embarrassing though it may have been, mine was not an extraordinary mistake, after all--a venial, not a mortal sin. But I confess it nonetheless."