Customer Reviews

Domenico Scarlatti, Complete Sonatas, Vol. 5: Scarlatti as chosen by Clementi

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Emilia Fadini edits the most recent complete printed edition of Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas and teaches at Milan conservatory. I had heard one of her earlier recordings in this series (Vol. 1, "The Spanish Influence," STR 33500), which was very good, and thought I knew what to expect.

The booklet by Fadini notes that the the Stradivarius recording project, like the Naxos series, is to record all Scarlatti sonatas with a variety of performers. But unlike the Naxos series, all on the modern concert grand, the Strad project plans to use all the instruments which might plausibly have been used to spread Scarlatti's music "throughout Europe during the whole of the eighteenth century." And again unlike Naxos, where the repertory of each album is determined by dice-roll, the Strad project claims to offer a focus for each album (as in "The Spanish Influence").

As a young piano student, I hated the collection of technical exercises, "Gradus ad Parnassum," by Muzio Clementi, so "Scarlatti as chosen by Clementi" was not enticing. But Clementi was influential as a piano manufacturer and popularizer and performer and even composer--Beethoven admired him! So the picks here, from Clementi's widely-reprinted edition of 1791, are the sonatas most likely to have been known to the key people of the next generation. And this performance is on an informed repro of a c. 1800 piano by Anton Walter built by Denzel Wraight. This is not the muted Christofori-style piano that Scarlatti would have known.

OK, imagine Scarlatti played by young Beethoven on a piano of his times. How can Fadini make this work? She transforms herself with this instrument. Scarlatti now has the full loud-soft but still within the sonority of the early-romantic ear.

Everything is good, but the third sonata, K 381, really pulls it together. It's not just the loud-soft, but the sudden shifts in tempo and dramatic pauses that make this one work. It's early-romantic playing. If I had to pick the masterpiece, I'd choose K 466. Performers who mess with the basic beat here lose the birhythm--like Horowitz does--but Fadini does that and makes it work. I've heard many fine performances of this creepy sonata, but if Tomsic reminds me of the local funeral parlor, Fadini is straight out of Edgar Allen Poe. Her performance is so intense that she skips the repeats, and I agree.

The paired K 467 is also done well, and Fadini finishes off with some fire in K 463. Yeah, the Amazon.com info is pretty sparse, so here's the program on this album: K 531, 380, 381, 402, 413, 206, 400, 401, 490, 491, 466, 467, 462, 463 for 71 minutes. Not a bad deal.

This recording really bridges the gap between Scarlatti's day and now.