Jenő Jandó - Scarlatti: Complete Keyboard Sonatas, Vol. 3 (2001)

"Domenico Scarlatti as born in 1785, the same year as Bach and Handel, and studied in Naples with his father Alessandro and in Venice with Francesco Gasparini; in Venice, indeed, he met Handel, who was in the city to advance his understanding of the Italian opera. Thereafter Scarlatti travelled widely: he worked in Rome, London, and Lisbon, before returning home to Naples in 1725. Four years later he moved to Madrid, where he lived for practically all his remaining years.

Scarlatti is chiefly famous for his five hundred and fifty keyboard sonatas, a body of work which developed the expressive range of this musical genre to an extraordinary degree. In common with his exact contemporary Bach, he wrote for the harpsichord with such verve and imagination that his music sounds equally well (if not better) on the modern piano; indeed it has rightly become a standard feature of the repertoire. The structures of the sonatas are considerably varied; the two featured here are both single movements.

This is Volume 3 in Naxos's Scarlatti project with the Hungarian pianist Jenö Jandó, who has already made recordings galore with the company in a wide range of repertoire. He is on excellent form here, playing with imagination, taste and dexterity, as required. For the nature of these pieces varies considerably from one to the next _ they are a veritable treasure trove of imaginative and engaging music. To prove the point just try the G major Sonata with which the CD begins. It makes compelling listening, such is the imagination at the heart of Scarlatti's inventiveness.

Jandó is at his very best in what is perhaps the strangest of the pieces collected here, the B major Sonata, K261. This unusual key certainly generated a distinctive response from the composer: after a fairly innocuous beginning, there is an obsessive insistence on repetitions of a single note as the music develops, and these performances capture the strange and compelling nature of the music with great imagination.

The recording too does justice to Scarlatti, with a nicely atmospheric presence and warmth, as well as a pleasing clarity which allows all the details of the music's extraordinary textures to be heard. With so many sonatas to his credit, it is inevitably tempting to think that Scarlatti composed merely to a formula. But nothing could be further from the truth, and this excellent disc serves him the music well."