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.

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.

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.

These are performances of the highest order…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.