Since its release on 20th June, critics have been raving about Bojan Čičić’s new release with the Illyria Consort, Heinrich Bier: Violin Sonatas - 1681. The album was #1 in Gramophone Magazine’s editor’s choice for July 2025, and BBC Radio 3’s Record Review Record of the Week. The album has also hit #1 in the Apple Top 100 Classical Charts for the week ending 4th July 2025.
Čičić offers more intimacy of performance, up close and personal. The continuo team is equally impressive, with moments of delightful dialogue between plucked textures.
From the opening of Sonata No 1 Čičić invites us under the bonnet of the music, and when virtuosic fireworks arrive they are thrillingly accurate. Sonata No 2 offers a particular highlight: the third variation with its stuttering hemi-demisemiquavers stands out for its combination of precision and nobility. It is Sonata No 5, though – a personal favourite – that really caught my attention. The improvisatory opening flows easily, and the moment the harpsichord arrives also heralds those famous ethereal double-stops; then there’s a very stylish segue into the Adagio, with its two-part writing.
The Allegro variations, however, are just stunning. Čičić balances the cornucopia of invention and contrast with a tumble of inevitability that creates a gripping sense of flow. His playing can be feisty, graceful and often remarkably rapid but it is never showy. It’s this combination of emotional depth with astonishing bravura that unlocks the underlying feeling of spirituality.
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.
BBC Radio 3 Record Review
These are performances of the highest order…a cornucopia of inventive delights from a man who wrung a new range of expressive virtuosity from the violin and a player who’s doing the same…with wonderful accopaniment from memebrs of his Illyria consort: lutenist Elizabeth Kenny, harpist Siobhan Armstrong, and keyboard player Steven Devine. Some fabulous improvising musicians and it shows in their continuo playing.
Čičić produces a remarkable palette of expressive colour and huge technical agility. There’s dance-like joy, soulful melancholy, passion, playfulness, and an instict for onrmentation that’s part of the sense of airborn effervescence that he brings to so much of the music.
