Lamento

Chenonceaux, Italian Staircase. This vaulted straight staircase is one of the first of its kind built in France. It was often used by the mournful and reclusive Louise of Lorraine after the assassination of her husband, Henry III, in 1589.

The Partita in D Minor is a six-movement work which clearly evinces the influence of Bach and Handel, although no identical dance sequence is found in either of the baroque masters' keyboard compositions.

The enigmatic lamento is a curiously irregular movement to which the composer attaches an ominous symbolism, as it was written only weeks before the death of his father in 1981 (note the overtly unsettling chain of fifths in the upper two voices in mm. 2-3).