"Throughout, the music, and Čičić’s playing, continually underline why the 17th century is often called the Golden Age of violin-playing; there’s a great combination of subtle nuance, bold contrast and sheer technical dazzle. ... For me, this release is a triumph and pretty much everything about it speaks of an artist entering the golden phase of his career. If it doesn’t win awards, I’ll be astonished ..."



RECORDING OF THE MONTH

"It was Manze’s recording of some 30 years ago that first inspired Čičić to specialise in Baroque violin, and his new recording for Delphian – closely-focused, and with plenty of ‘grain’ – was made in the same venue of St Martin’s Church, East Woodhay, Hampshire. A former leader of the Academy of Ancient Music, Čičić has already won acclaim for recordings ranging from Bach and Handel to Carbonelli, Giornovich and Walther. Here, together with his colleagues, he achieves an ideal blend between dazzling technical prowess and penetrating musicality ... Čičić and his colleagues respond brilliantly to the mercurial changes of affect with great inventiveness and sensitivity ... These are demanding yet constantly absorbing works that are open to more than one approach (not least in their more free-form movements), but for those wanting the complete set, Čičić and the Illyria Consort are now the ones to go for. It’s another wonderful addition to their Delphian discography"

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

"The music’s structural threads – not golden; more silver – with which Čičič never once loses touch, quietly demand nuance and rumination, both of which these outstanding performances unostentatiously extend to them.

This is not a recording to be missed, even though you may own one or more of the other ‘front-runners’. Čičič and his continuo prize intimacy and delicacy, which they are happy to expose to the closest of gazes. Indeed, the instruments are closely miked without risking an over-rhetorical aura. At times, there is also something of the ‘masterclass’ to the pacing of these performances. That is not to say that you sit expecting interruption; they are definitely uninterruptible. Rather, there is so much of moment and satisfying breadth for it not to matter that not everything is given up on a single reading. You are left feeling that, each time you listen to these performances, you’ll glean something fresh."

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

"Bojan Cičić is an athletic virtuoso who is comfortably able to communicate the myriad expressive subtleties of Biber's music, sometimes gently and alluringly expressive, at others exuberant and extrovert. He embraces the rhetoric more fluently than some of his rivals as readers will quickly find in pieces such as the elegiac C minor Sonata, perhaps the least unfamiliar of the eight."

"It’s the aural equivalent of top-tier gymnastics or ballet. Čičić is unafraid of sounding a bit gritty at times - in the brief but vaguely rustic-sounding Presto of the first sonata, for example, and indeed even in the very first track, the opening Praeludium. That's not to say that he's all attack and no sweetness - there's a beautiful lightness in the Aria of the second sonata, and the lyrical simplicity of his playing in the Adagios of both the sixth and seventh sonatas especially stands out."

RECORDING OF THE WEEK