Customer Reviews

Sonatas for Guitar

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This is one of the very best recordings of Scarlatti on guitar. Possessing a brilliant technique and an incisive musicality, Schmidt makes these pieces sound as if they were written for the instrument. Ornamentation is primarily cross-string, and liberally employed. Several pieces are performed to excellent effect on a 10-string (Yepes-type) guitar. Other than Roberto Aussell (and, lamentably, the old Leo Brouwer recording, still not on CD, as far as I know) Schmidt has no peers in the guitar world when it comes to Scarlatti.

Every time I've played K 162 on keyboard or listened to it on a recording, I've wondered what it would sound like on guitar. Stephan Schmidt's performance doesn't disappoint! W. Dean Sutcliffe calls the opening Andante a pastorale, but I imagine a couple strolling with tension building--they say "We could stroll--or we could DANCE." That's pretty much how Schmidt plays it, and he describes the dance character, along with the satanic difficulty of the figuration in the Allegro sections, in his notes. The ornaments are played very cleanly, too, but what is finest is his phrasing of the Andante sections. What at first glance looks like (and sounds like, in most keyboard recordings) a drone bass is actually some tense counterpoint, and Schmidt brings these lines out well.

K 162 alone is worth buying the recording for, but there are many other gems. Schmidt has a great control of dynamics, and he uses it to bring out the "melancholy undertone" of K 466. He also sounds great in naturally guitaristic sonatas, like the opening K 391 and the concluding K 146. If I have any complaint, it's that a few sonatas sound a little too studied. Take K 209, for example. It's difficult as hell to play, and Schmidt is very impressive in his ability to get nearly all the notes to both sound and to connect to the contrapuntal web (Schmidt's Bach recordings are famous). But K 209 is a lively dance and one of the few sonatas that everyone--even the Spanish--agree has real Spanish character, both of which are lacking in Schmidt's performance. Eliot Fisk brings more excitement to K 209 on the guitar.

But what I complain of is probably Schmidt's intent. In his self-written program notes, he says that he didn't want to sound like an imitation of the harpsichord, but he also planned "to avoid any too 'guitaristic' colour or effect." So maybe he should just have played some other sonata.

But these performances, even K 209, are great. The speed and grace of the concluding K 146 kept me hitting "repeat."

The accompanying booklet is slack. Why can't Auvidis, the CD producer, bother to put the keys and tempo of each sonata on the list of works played? This info is provided in the program notes, along with commentary on each individual sonata, but only in the German text. The abridged French and English translations are also kind of wayward, and even the German text has sloppy errors (K 576 instead of K 513) that could be eliminated by cursory copy-editing.