BARGAIN OF THE MONTH
Domenico SCARLATTI (1685-1757)
Complete Keyboard Sonatas - Volume 1
Essercizi per gravicembalo - 30 sonatas (1738-39)
Parma Book 1 - 30 sonatas (1751-52)
Parma Book 2 - 30 sonatas (1752)
Carlo Grante (Bösendorfer Imperial piano)
rec. Studio Glanzing, Vienna, 2009
MUSIC & ARTS CD 1236 [6 CDs: 50:57 + 64:14 + 61:31 + 73:51 + 67:46
+ 73:56]
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
Profoundly impressive.