Scarlatti: Complete Sonatas, Vol. 8 – Essercizi per gravicembalo, Pt. 1

Album review

This disc is part of a series on Italy's Stradivarius label, covering all of the numerous and varied keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. The series includes discs by several different keyboardists, playing the different keyboard instruments (harpsichord, fortepiano, organ) on which Scarlatti's sonatas were known in their own time; on this set, Ottavio Dantone plays the harpsichord. Included here are the sonatas that make up the first half of Scarlatti's "Essercizi per il gravicembalo," or Exercises for keyboard; the other 15 sonatas are on another disc, played by someone else. The "Essercizi" are the only published set of Scarlatti sonatas we know about; the others have come down to us in an undifferentiated mass that yields few clues as to how Scarlatti grouped or performed them. Thus it's a bit frustrating that they weren't presented as a two-disc set; the sonatas given here fall naturally into groups (due to related keys, or strict/playful pairs), and the entire set suggests deeper relationships. All this said, Dantone is a superb Scarlatti interpreter on the harpsichord. He puts to rest for good the idea that one needs a piano or some kind of powerful modern harpsichord to realize the brilliance and harmonic daring of Scarlatti, whose big, pounding cadences must have seemed a real thrill ride to audiences of his time. Dantone plays a modern copy of a 1737 instrument -- exactly right for these works, which were published around 1739. He creates a big tone out of the instrument's slender sound by sustaining groups of tones and filling the spaces of the music with sound. Scarlatti's "Exercises" resemble Chopin's etudes in that both are much more than teaching pieces; they exercise the imagination as well as the fingers in exploring all of the potentialities of their chosen instruments. Indeed, many of these pieces are quite difficult, veering into flights of virtuoso passagework that quickly make you forget that formally the music falls into the simple binary forms of the dances in Handel's Water Music. (Scarlatti anticipated the harmonic-rhythm aspect of Classicism but not its formal aspects.) Dantone executes everything not just cleanly but with breathtaking brilliance. You'll wish you had two discs of Essercizi rather than only one, but you could also do a lot worse for an introduction to the sparkling world of Scarlatti's keyboard music.
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