Carlo Grante’s undertaking in recording the complete Scarlatti
keyboards is both extensive and laudable. He plays a piano,
a vast Bösendorfer Imperial, so can immediately be distinguished
from the legion of harpsichordists that has colonised this music
of late. There is still a valued place for a pianist of insight
to tackle this repertoire and I, for one, find the prescriptive
nature of so much critical writing on this subject tiring. Why
shouldn’t a pianist play Scarlatti?
Grante is perhaps best known for tackling powerhouse late nineteenth
and twentieth century repertoire, so here one may need to adjust
one’s perspective, or one’s expectations. In fact
he scales down his playing, despite the vast beast under his
control, with admirable sensitivity and a fine ear for colour
and dynamics. He is also attentive to ornaments, plays trills
and repeated figures with clarity, evenness and poise, and moreover
sounds stylistically apt throughout the course of the whole
of this first set of six CDs. In many ways his playing is a
primer of how a contemporary pianist playing a nineteenth century
instrument can convey this music through subtlety and nuance.
Throughout this undertaking one notices just how plausible are
Grante’s solutions to any musical problems, and how nicely
he characterises the sonatas without recourse to exaggeration
either of tempo or dynamics. He catches the roguish quality
of E3 (K3) for instance, with perfect poise, as he does the
vein of melancholy that runs throughout E8 (K8). In even so
famous a work as the D minor E9 (K9) he still brings a sense
of ‘face’ or occasion as though he’s seldom
encountered it before. Nothing is stale in his hands. Nor do
the opportunities to exaggerate the left hand tempt him. The
bass is not overstressed, but it does function as a galvanizing
agent - as in E12.
He is astute when dealing with Scarlattian fanfare figures,
nicely texturing E17 for example. His unhurried tempo for E22
(K22) is delightful and the performance is full of nuance, with
subtlety in caesurae, and splendidly balanced chording. He is
partial to those moments where Scarlatti requires of the performer
a profound simplicity, such as one finds in the case of one
of the first books in the Parma series - the rapt sonata in
D major P1:17 (K164). But Grante is alert to those moments too
where Scarlatti’s sense of bustle can lead almost to bibulous
loss of control. The A minor in the first Parma book - P1:28
(K175) features just such episodes where the music almost runs
out of control - but Grante and Scarlatti corral it in the end.
The obsessive restatement of material in which Scarlatti sometimes
engages is best exemplified in the second Parma book, in the
G major allegro sonata P2:3 (K24) though the succeeding sonata
displays another quality, too, in the floridity of the decorative
runs. Grante’s graceful phrasing is notable in the eighth
of the second book (K135), so too the pealing assurance in the
ninth. The first fifteen sonatas in Parma Book 2 are amongst
the most genuinely appealing of all these many works, and a
good place with which to begin your own Grante-Scarlatti pilgrimage.
But don’t neglect the folkloric P2:16 (K120) with its
hunting motifs or the stately P2:21 (K127). Excellent though
the earlier sonatas are, these 30 Essercizi (or ‘Exercises’),
published between 1738 and ’39, are less compelling than
the sixty Parma sonatas.
There is considerable doubt over the dating of these works,
and indeed over the viability of these ‘books’ of
sonatas, but the ordering here is both useful and indeed makes
strong musicological sense. The extensive notes consider these
and other questions in some considerable depth.
Naxos is in the process of recording the complete Scarlatti
sonatas on the piano but they have been parcelled out to a number
of pianists. For a single overview, beautifully played, and
recorded, the first box in Music & Arts’ series is
profoundly impressive.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review by Byzantion
Carlo Grante (Bösendorfer Imperial piano) 
