Find out more about the music in this performance
written by Jonas Nordberg
Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687–1750) was the most significant lutenist and the most prolific composer of lute music during the first half of the 18th century, the last golden age of the lute. He was employed as a lutenist at the courts in Breslau, Rome and Dresden, and often travelled on concert tours with some of the great musicians of the era.
“STOLEN” uses his sonata no. 52 as a kind of foundation for the exploration between music, dance and space. The work begins with an ouverture, a musical form that is primarily associated with French Baroque opera from this period, with dramatic dotted rhythms, dark tones and bold harmonies in a slow introduction, followed by a dance-like fugato. Weiss distils all the colours and dynamic contrasts of the French baroque orchestra, reducing it down to the delicate and intimate sounds of the baroque lute, yet retaining bombastic expression and elegant ornamentation.
The sonata also consists of a series of dance movements: Courante, Bourrée, Siciliano, Menuet and finally, a wild, galloping Presto. Stylistically, Weiss mixes inspiration from France and Italy, held together by his German knowledge of counterpoint. The music is often fluid, with long passages of uniform quavers running in sequences that the ear quickly learns to follow. This is also reflected in the choreography and gives the duo scope to work spontaneously and intuitively on the stage, like two chamber-music partners creating in the moment, with movement and music taking turns in joining together and breaking away.
