Sonatina del Sur op. 98

The Sonatina del Sur (Sonatina of the South) was commissioned by Isabel Siewers’ mother as a 34th birthday present for her daughter. Its music pays token, rather than imitative, homage to South American music. Thus the sonata form first movement, whose brief development section accounts for the work’s ‘diminutive’ title, merely hints at syncopations that are as common in South America as they are in Europe.

The Canción de cuna (Cradle Song) is unusual in the fact that it is played entirely in natural harmonics – no string touches a fret from start to finish, a compositional challenge I had long planned to face. The third movement was originally titled Milonga, but when the dedicatee said that, although it has a South American air over it, and the rhythm is right, it was not really like a milonga, it was renamed!

Perhaps, though, it captures a little of the happy and lightness-of-touch character of its eponym. The Danza negra, another common South American genre, is energetic, with a variety of percussive gestures that demand extreme agility on the part of the performer.