Domenico Scarlatti (1685 1757). Complete Piano Sonatas Vol 05. Benjamin Frith, Piano (reup)

Making a career and some recordings in the USA, pianist Beatrice Long features as the fourth pianist to contribute a volume in the Naxos projected series of the complete sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. The recording was made in 1996 but not issued until 2002. It will do little to enhance the reputation of the pianist, the series, or Scarlatti himself. There is drama, magic, grandeur and ingenuity aplenty in these single movement works, but little of it is projected here.

Kudos to Naxos for the way it has handled its ongoing series covering Domenico's enormous body of keyboard sonatas: in a repertory only (at best) loosely divisible into chronological or stylistic groupings, they have opted instead to divide the sonatas up among different performers. The buyer gets to look at these miniature masterworks, which can be performed in so many different ways, through different lenses.

I will yield to no one in my admiration for Scarlatti's piano sonatas (he modestly called them 'Essercizi' ['Exercises']), have played many of them at the piano, and have many, many recordings of them, including the complete set done by harpsichordist Scott Ross, before his too-early death. Naxos is slowly issuing a series that will eventually comprise all 555 sonatas, and each issue features a different pianist. Evgeny Zarafiants is a pianist previously unknown to me.

This is the second volume of Music & Arts' complete Scarlatti project performed by Carlo Grante. New Classics [UK] wrote of that release: Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form…. Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys.

This is the second volume of Music & Arts' complete Scarlatti project performed by Carlo Grante. New Classics [UK] wrote of that release: Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form…. Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys.

This group of Domenico Scarlatti keyboard sonatas from an ongoing Naxos series presents what can fairly be called an old-fashioned approach to the composer's music, although that's not to say anything against it. The young Korean American pianist Soyeon Lee harks back to the times when pianists phrased Scarlatti a good deal like Mozart, who himself was viewed through the prism of Romanticism. In place of the percussive harpsichord rhythms and sharp contrasts of recent Scarlatti performances, you get pedal, gracefully shaped phrases, and a smoothing of the edges of Scarlatti's style.

This is the second volume of Music & Arts' complete Scarlatti project performed by Carlo Grante. New Classics [UK] wrote of that release: Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form…. Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys.

Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) and Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) prove to be engaging and complementary characters in the hands of German pianist Julius Asal, whose debut Deutsche Grammophon album is set for release in all formats on 3 May 2024. Scriabin – Scarlatti is built from works by two composers rarely mentioned in the same breath, the one a Russian absorbed by mysticism and its expression in the arts, the other a Neapolitan noted for the panache of his 555 keyboard sonatas. The album creates a dreamlike meditation in which the boundaries between pieces, eras and states of mind fade away. “Everything’s possible in a dream”, says the 27-year-old artist, who has a rare talent for innovative programme curation. “Even seemingly different materials from different times and with different densities can merge and create a new substance that’s never existed before. That’s how I felt while I was recording the music of Scriabin and Scarlatti.”