The Sonata ‘in the style of the priest who plays the Portuguese guitar’ (a colleague, perhaps, of Tartini at Padua) is taken up largely with virtuosic passage-work, though it is cast in the slow-fast-slow-fast pattern. The ‘Portuguese guitar’ can presumably be heard in the wild harmonic shifts and clashes of the first and third movements, reminiscent of Iberian folk music. In the slow movement the alternation of improvisatory arpeggios and simple chords is probably meant to represent the characteristic method of playing the Baroque guitar, which interspersed fingered passages with rasgueado (strummed) chords.
from notes by Peter Holman © 1992
;)
