Partita No. 1 (The Courtier)

Partita 1. (The Courtier) seems a historically “misinformed” piece, in which the modernist prism serves as a temporal looking glass. Each movement plays metaphorically with the courtly lute music of the Renaissance and Baroque. Cumuliform is a cloud-like exploratory prelude, while Galante begins the off-kilter dances.  Empfindsamer is played “offstage”, a distant echo of the secrecy implied in the movement’s title. The moods then shift from a lilting romanticism (Air de cour), and insistent, antagonizing triplets (Brisė), closing with a coda of harmonics like tolling bells, echoes of the disembodied opening of Cumuliform.