Scarlatti: Six Sonatas

Day 262

Dominico Scarlatti: Six Sonatas - K262 to K267

Scott Ross

How do you begin to get to grips with the output of a composer who wrote 555 sonatas? Over the years I have head a few of them and had a go at playing some. I got the big CD box of Scott Ross playing them all in a sale a couple of years ago and sometimes dip into it - but I haven’t diligently studied any of them.

For this project I decided to pick a group of sonatas at random and as this is day 262 I started with sonata 262 and look in the next five.  This is fascinating music - completely unpredictable both within pieces and between them. At time one is reminded that Scarlatti was born in the same year as J S Bach but at other times he seems to occupy a completely different world. The keyboard techniques he uses are highly varied and at times the harmony takes him to very strange places. 

I had thought that Scarlatti’s work was well known to composers of his time but that was not the case at all. Only a small number of the sonatas were published in his lifetime and it is not known how widely his work was disseminated. Chopin certainly used some of the sonatas in his teaching, but it was probably only in the 20th century that the music became more widely known, with several notable pianists, including Horowitz and Dinu Lipatti featuring them in recitals.

I don’t suppose that I will ever hear the entire set - at one a day it would take the best part of two years - but I am sure that I will continue to sample their delights from time to time.