Naxos Scarlatti

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 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.

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.

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.

The son of Alessandro Scarlatti, who created a new school of opera in Naples, Domenico Scarlatti is particularly renowned for his remarkable keyboard sonatas, of which some 555 survive. Written for performance on the various keyboard instruments of the Spanish court, where Scarlatti was employed for many years, these astonishingly inventive and absorbing sonatas alternate between quick-witted virtuoso effects and deeply expressive lyricism.

Bei Kammerkantaten Alessandro Scarlattis (1660–1725) ist das Prädikat “Weltersteinspielung” leicht zu verdienen: Über 780 solche Werke hat der in Rom und Neapel wirkende Meister komponiert und die Quellenlage ist dabei noch immer problematisch und unübersichtlich. So verwundert es nicht, dass dieser musikalische Schatz bis heute in Edition und Diskographie weitgehend unerschlossen geblieben ist.

Scarlatti's sonatas were originally entitled 'Essercizi' ('Exercises'), and their purpose was to provide musical études for the development of keyboard technique, primarily for his patroness, Queen Maria Barbara of Spain, who must have been a talented harpsichordist. In one of his published collections, he indicated that the Essercizi offer 'no profound Learning, but rather an ingenious Jesting with Art, to accomodate you to the Mastery of the Harpsichord.'