Domenico Scarlatti reviews
Yevgeny Sudbin plays D Scarlatti's Keyboard Sonatas
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s description of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas as ‘a soft hail of pearls that rush, gleam, resonate, bounce’ could well have inspired the Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin in these sparkling and vivacious accounts. This recording showcases 18 of these gems and Sudbin highlights their endless variety: shimmering studies and stately fugues are laced together with vigorous dances and elegiac reflections.
Virginia Black Performs Domenico Scarlatti
Keyboard Sonatas
Arias for Domenico Gizzi
Before Farinelli appeared on the scene, Domenico Gizzi was the darling of opera devotees throughout Italy. Like many great castrati, Gizzi trained in Naples, home for the absolutist taste that these singers, in all their strangeness, embodied. Launched in opera in Rome, Gizzi attracted a fan base that included Cardinal Ottoboni, Prince Ruspoli, and the ‘Old Pretender’ James Francis Edward Stuart. The castrato’s art was created for their delectation, and composers crafted the necessary vehicles.
Cage • D Scarlatti
This terrific CD from David Greilsammer ingeniously interweaves sonatas from Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes with sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, written some 200 years earlier. He’s not the first – Melvyn Tan did the same at the Edinburgh Festival – but he does it with extraordinary musical sensitivity and dramatic flair. Greilsammer adds to the strangeness of experience by making each sonata follow hard on the heels of the previous one.
Collection: The Scarlatti Family
Alessandro Scarlatti’s 600-plus cantatas make him one of the more prolific exponents of a form that flourished in Italy in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Though he’s generally credited with standardising cantata form, his early essays in the genre were often imaginatively varied, as is shown by the delectable Arcadian Academy disc.
D Scarlatti: Lettere amorose: cantatas, sonatas & operatic duets
A warm welcome to a disc which makes an effective gesture towards interrelating the vocal and instrumental music of Domenico Scarlatti. Alan Curtis has devised a characteristically interesting programme of three chamber cantatas and two opera duets interspersed with three groups of harpsichord sonatas. About 50 well-authenticated cantatas have come down to us, most of them probably dating from Scarlatti’s years in Rome between 1708 and 1719.
D Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonatas
Three new discs of keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti reflect the wide range of interpretative approaches that exist nowadays. Canadian Luc Beauséjour, in the second volume of what is presumably to be an extended, if not complete survey, has chosen a harpsichord, the instrument for which Scarlatti intended almost all of his sonatas. Christian Zacharias, by contrast, plays a modern piano, while Emilia Fadini, in what proves to be the most interesting of the three recordings, prefers a fortepiano copied from a late 18th-century instrument by Anton Walter.
D Scarlatti: A major Sonatas, K322, K323
Three new discs of keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti reflect the wide range of interpretative approaches that exist nowadays. Canadian Luc Beauséjour, in the second volume of what is presumably to be an extended, if not complete survey, has chosen a harpsichord, the instrument for which Scarlatti intended almost all of his sonatas. Christian Zacharias, by contrast, plays a modern piano, while Emilia Fadini, in what proves to be the most interesting of the three recordings, prefers a fortepiano copied from a late 18th-century instrument by Anton Walter.
D Scarlatti: Stabat mater; Te Deum; Magnificat; Miserere in E minor; Laetatus sum
Domenico Scarlatti’s Stabat mater is, and seems always to have been, among the most popular of his comparatively small number of sacred vocal pieces. He probably wrote it between the years 1708 and 1728 when he was primarily employed as a church composer in Rome and in Lisbon. His setting of the 13th-century text is in ten parts divided into four soprano strands, two alto, two tenor and two bass with continuo. The style – a blend of older techniques with more up-to-date means of expression – is curiously anonymous and fails to sustain interest throughout.
Domenico Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonatas
I am not absolutely mad about the idea of Scarlatti on the piano, and I regard it as fatuous when I read, ‘If only Bach and Scarlatti had been able to hear our marvellous Steinway grands, they would have...?’ Well, they didn’t have our marvellous Steinway grands, they had their marvellous harpsichords and less than marvellous fortepianos at their disposal. Having said this, one would be churlish not to admire the fine playing and subtle comprehension of Anne Queffélec’s recording, made a quarter of a century ago.
Pergolesi,D Scarlatti, Bononcini, Lotti, Caldara & A Scarlatti
This anthology of devotional music from 18th-century Venice and Naples offers an interesting and varied programme. Best known is Pergolesi’s Stabat mater, but the settings by Domenico Scarlatti and Bononcini stand well in comparison. The motets by Lotti, Caldara and Alessandro Scarlatti are real discoveries; Norrington’s performances of the latter are particularly fine. Guest’s Pergolesi suffers from a focus of sound which makes the interpretation seem somewhat generalised. However, all these performances give pleasure, while the music is melodically fresh and rhythmically vital. Terry Barfoot
D Scarlatti/A Scarlatti/Hasse
Congratulations to Hyperion on imaginative programming of repertoire, some not otherwise available on disc, and revived in new performing editions. There is a price to pay: King admits, and I agree, that Alessandro Scarlatti ventures ‘a brave (and partly successful) attempt to make the ground bass [...] interesting’ in the cantata Su le sponde – but not before Steele-Perkins’s clarino trumpet has dazzled and a lover’s plaint (Deborah York) has melted the hardest heart.
Domenico Scarlatti: Sonatas
If you want just one disc representing Scarlatti’s output of over 550 sonatas, you might do worse than settle for this. The 18 selected are not among the best known, but they offer variety and some real plums. Staier adopts Kirkpatrick’s suggested pairings, but sometimes ignores repeats. In the slower pieces he uses a lot of rubato, de-synchronises his hands, spreads chords and adds extra ornamentation. In the fast sonatas he’s passionate and dashing. The instrument is a modern American one based on mid-18th-century models, and it makes a gorgeous sound. Adrian Jack
Domenico Scarlatti: Harpsichord Sonatas
The late Ralph Kirkpatrick was not only one of the century’s most noted Scarlatti scholars, but also a performer who enjoyed a reputation during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies as an illuminating interpreter of late Baroque harpsichord music. This disc, recorded in 1971, was one of the last he made and it is a fine testament to his many insights into Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonatas.
Domenico Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonatas
Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas have been subjected to all sorts of treatments. I still possess an LP played by Valda Aveling on a cumbersomely large instrument which she treats like a 19th-century organ; many harpsichordists continued to over-register performances well into the Eighties. Far better to hear them played by a sensitive artist like Mikhail Pletnev, whose piano recital on Virgin is wonderful, though an appropriate harpsichord is still better when it comes to matters of articulation.
Domenico Scarlatti: Sonatas
The cover is ambiguous. Domenico Scarlatti’s Essercizi per gravicembalo is the title of a collection of 30 harpsichord sonatas, printed in London in about 1739. Gustav Leonhardt’s discerningly chosen but random selection of 14 pieces includes only one of them. The remaining sonatas, like the majority, were unpublished during Scarlatti’s lifetime. This is a spirited and virtuoso recital in which Leonhardt revels in the myriad contrapuntal conceits, imitations, cascades, syncopations, chromaticisms and dissonances which reflect Scarlatti’s radiant genius.
Domenico Scarlatti: Missa breve (La Stella); Stabat mater; Te Deum; Iste confessor; Cibavit eos
This outstanding disc of sacred music by Domenico Scarlatti (who is better known today for his vast output of keyboard sonatas) pays glorious tribute to the composer’s early career in Italy. Through his father, Alessandro, Domenico benefited from the influences of the generation that followed Monteverdi. Here, The Sixteen sings a group of works that reveal the composer’s astonishing stylistic and expressive range and their sensational vocal and dynamic control has been preserved in superb recordings.
D Scarlatti, Porpora, Hasse, Vinci, Gasparini, Bononcini, Porta & Amadei
Handel’s operatic career was beset with rivalries. In the 1720s the chief threat came from his fellow Royal Academy composer Giovanni Bononcini; in the 1730s it was a rival company, the Opera of the Nobility, headed by the composer Nicola Porpora and starring the great castrato Farinelli.
Domenico Scarlatti, Handel
Most guitarists eke out their repertoire with the guitar music other composers would have written if only they had thought of it. Duos rely even more on transcriptions. For the Katonas, camped-up Handel works better than earnest Scarlatti in a disc of bizarre but genuine appeal.
Domenico Scarlatti: Cantatas: O qual meco Nice; Pur nel sonno almen tal'ora; Che vidi, oh ciel, che vidi
Domenico Scarlatti’s fame rests entirely on his keyboard sonatas, and his cantatas are barely known at all to modern audiences. These three works are all premiere recordings, and the ensemble performing them here is likely to be new to many readers, too. The group has much to offer, and those weary of the usual suspects in Baroque musical performance may well be invigorated by its colourful sound and forthright, expressive approach. But the star of the disc is soprano Cyrille Gerstenhaber, whose singing is by turns thrillingly dramatic and sleepily sensuous.
Domenico Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonatas
A New Yorker cartoon some years ago portrayed a dispute arising from a radio broadcast in a cultured Manhattan household. A clearly irritated woman is saying to her male companion: ‘Why can’t you just say “Scarlatti” instead of “Scarlatti, of course”.’ While one’s sympathies are with the woman, the smug WASP she is living with has a point: nothing sounds quite like Scarlatti. All those strummed guitar effects, the disarmingly casual discords and lyrical passages uncannily suited to the piano form a unique blend.
Loeillet, Vivaldi, Handel & D Scarlatti
Glasgow-born David Russell is a classical guitarist with one of the mellowest tones that I can recall ever having heard. His programme of Baroque music consists entirely of arrangements of sonatas and a suite for a variety of other instruments, rather than pieces written for lute or theorbo.
D Scarlatti, Soler, Seixas, Ferrer, Carvallo, Albero & Jacinto
Domenico Scarlatti was such an extraordinary individualist that he tends to tower above and obscure the musical world around him, first in Lisbon, then Madrid. The situation is aggravated by the destruction by fire of a great deal of music from his Portuguese contemporaries, following the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
D Scarlatti: Iste confessor; Missa La stella; Stabat mater
Harry Christophers and The Sixteen are surely on to a real winner with this newly launched edition of their acclaimed recordings. The Flowering of Genius commemorates the opulent 1554 Christmas Day celebration in honour of Mary Tudor and Philip II of Spain. The Sixteen’s impressive architectural shaping in music by Guerrero and Tallis, its expressive intensity in the pieces by Victoria, evocative overlapping phrases in Monte’s Super flumina Babylonis, and ethereal presence in Sheppard’s Verbum caro make a sublime musical and spiritual experience.