Angela Hewitt专辑介绍：The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti are unique in the history of music. The sheer volume of them—some 555 in all—is astounding. It takes about 34 hours to play through them all (Beethoven’s complete piano works would only take half that time). Bach comes close, but only if you include the organ works. The great majority are written in binary form—two sections, both repeated. It seems they were also largely written for one person, Scarlatti’s very gifted pupil, patron and friend Princess Maria Barbara of Portugal, who became the Queen of Spain. None exists in the composer’s hand. They have all been passed down to us—thanks to the famous castrato Farinelli, who transported them back to Italy from Spain—in manuscripts copied by others. It is also exceptional that most of them were written after Scarlatti had reached the age of fifty.Born in Naples in 1685, the same year as Bach and Handel, Domenico (or ‘Mimo’ as he was nicknamed) was brought up in a clan of musicians, the most famous being his father, Alessandro Scarlatti. The latter’s fame as a composer of operas and cantatas seems to have overshadowed Domenico’s talents, even though Alessandro did everything he could to help his son. After periods of living and working in Naples, Venice and Rome (as maestro di cappella at the Vatican), he was hired as Kapellmeister by João V of Portugal, probably arriving there in 1719. Most of the records of this time were lost in the great Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755. There is much we will never know.After his father’s death in 1725, Scarlatti’s life bloomed. He married for the first time at the age of forty-two. His bride was only sixteen, and it was most likely an arranged marriage, as was common at the time in Mediterranean countries. Ralph Kirkpatrick, to whom we owe so much for his 1953 biography of Scarlatti, makes an interesting presumption. Domenico’s marriage coincided with the marriage of his cherished pupil, Princess Maria Barbara (then eighteen), to the heir of the Spanish throne, two years her junior. It is evident that the flowering of his genius coincided with the constant contact with his pupil, and that she insisted that he follow her to Spain. At the time her whole musical life was wrapped up with Domingo Escarlati (as she called him). To quote Kirkpatrick: ‘A reflection of Domenico’s own attachment for his royal pupil might be seen in the curious coincidence that his bride was almost the same age as Maria Barbara.’ Scarlatti remained in the employment of Maria Barbara for the rest of his life.Only the first thirty sonatas (as numbered in Kirkpatrick’s edition) were published during Scarlatti’s lifetime, and these were issued in London, thanks to the Irish composer and organist Thomas Roseingrave. At the end of the preface to these ‘Esercizi per il gravicembalo’, presumably written by the composer, appear words which set the stage for this music so full of life: ‘Vivi felice’ (‘Live happily’). The first complete edition appeared in 1906 published by Ricordi and edited by Longo. It is notable that Brahms owned seven volumes (containing 308 sonatas) in manuscript copies.In my future Scarlatti recordings (and yes, I hope there will be others!), I can write more about the history of these pieces and Scarlatti’s life as we know it. For the moment I would like to explain how I chose the sonatas on this first album. Kirkpatrick was convinced that many of the sonatas were meant to be paired. W Dean Sutcliffe, in his book on Scarlatti’s sonatas published in 2003, does not agree. I tried making sense of this, but often found that one sonata in a pair was not nearly as interesting as the next and rather diminished the effect. Instead I have arranged them in groups that make a satisfying whole when performed in concert.I have chosen to open this album with the Sonata in D minor, Kk9. This is perhaps the most popular of all Scarlatti’s sonatas, and was already so in the nineteenth century when it earned the nickname ‘Pastorale’. The gentle swaying rhythm needs to move without hurry. A lot of basic things are essential to playing this piece: beauty of tone, cantabile style, a feeling for dance, articulation, evenness of fingerwork in the runs, trills, sensitivity to harmonies and their progressions, and perhaps above all a certain poignancy of feeling which for me is most evident in the final bars. In the late 1980s a (perhaps?) earlier version of this sonata was discovered by Giorgio Pestelli in Turin, and the last bar contained a descending arpeggio in the right hand, including the mediant F. What a good idea it was to take that out and remain on a unison D!The Sonata in C major, Kk159, is hardly less popular. To many people the most obvious feature of this piece is that it imitates hunting horns at the beginning. Which indeed it does. But for any Italian, especially one from Naples (Scarlatti’s birthplace), this sonata is above all a tarantella—a Neapolitan dance if ever there was one. One of the chief characteristics of the tarantella is its alternation of major and minor, and this sonata does exactly that: the second section opens in C minor and stays rooted to the minor mode until the resumption of the theme after the descending flourish. This sonata also hints at classical sonata form with the re-exposition of the opening material in the tonic key. (Incidentally, in bars 57–59 I adopt the text in the Longo edition, which mirrors the similar passage of bars 18–20. Surely this passage must have depended on the range of the instrument available to Scarlatti when he wrote the sonata. Some 28 of the 555 sonatas include this top G, and I can’t help thinking that Scarlatti would have utilized it had it been available.)I remember the day I discovered the Sonata in B minor, Kk87, and was astonished by its beauty. The stepwise counterpoint and syncopated suspensions hark back to Palestrina, a composer who was revered by one of Scarlatti’s teachers, Bernardo Pasquini. Pasquini wrote in 1690: ‘Whoever pretends to be a musician, or organist, and does not taste the nectar, who does not drink the milk of these divine compositions of Palestrina, is without doubt, and always will be, a miserable wretch.’ The closeness of the hands at the beginning somehow emphasizes the tension created by the hovering of the music around the tonic, rarely straying from it for long. The sorrowful thirds in bars 27–29 become even more intense after the climax in bar 44, also creating a hemiola. The bass drops twice in a cycle of fifths, before this inspired sonata ends with a downwards, exhausted gesture.To complete this first group of four sonatas, I have chosen the Sonata in D major, Kk29. I can almost imagine Bach taking note of this sonata before he wrote his ‘Goldberg’ Variations (it was published a few years earlier than the ‘Goldbergs’). Famous for his hand-crossing high jinks, Scarlatti includes some of his most masochistic examples here (which have been excised from many editions). I have yet to see anyone, at least in performance, play the trumpet calls in bars 3–5 with the left hand as marked. Quite apart from the required virtuosity, you would need to be very thin and not to be wearing much clothing if disaster were to be avoided! The sonata is a fusion, as Sutcliffe calls it, of toccata and flamenco. The brilliance of the toccata touch has to be peppered with the passion of the flamenco spirit in order for this piece to be successful, especially in the passage first introduced in bar 16. Kirkpatrick rightly highlights the importance of pauses between the various sections that can be held for longer than notated. For a lot of this piece the bar lines are irrelevant and fall in all the ‘wrong’ places.The Sonata in A major, Kk113, opens another imagined group of four. And what an opening it is! A brief fanfare is followed by hustle and bustle, a gathering of people perhaps for a big event. It turns into a moto perpetuo, greatly enhanced by the game of hand-crossing and the harmonic excursions. In the Venice manuscript the tempo indication is Allegro; in the Parma one it is Vivo. Longo used his own Allegrissimo. I think it is important not to race through it too fast, otherwise the character is lost. Godowsky made an arrangement of this sonata and included it in his suite Renaissance. Although he adds a tonne of notes, he strangely takes out almost all of the hand-crossings.The Sonata in D major, Kk430, is one of Scarlatti’s most charming sonatas. The tempo indication is Non presto ma a tempo di ballo (Not fast but in the tempo of a dance). This is one example of how Scarlatti can express so much with so little. One is captured immediately by its simple tune. As in the opening bars of Kk113, much is made of interjections in the lower register (here beginning in bar 19). Horns accompany a leaping figure before the double bar line. Scarlatti can’t help being Scarlatti, though, and shoves in a G sharp when you are least expecting it (bar 63).The beautiful Sonata in G minor, Kk8—the slower sonata in this group—is a study for the execution of dotted notes, never an easy thing to come to terms with when they are constant throughout a piece. There’s also the four-part counterpoint to deal with which, with the addition of numerous ties and syncopations, necessitates very careful study. While writing these notes I’ve noticed that somewhere along the line it has been given the title ‘Bucolic’, which seems completely wrong to me. Does it not have a great nobility and sadness to it? The pedal-point at the end of each section has an arpeggiated chord imitating the strumming of the open strings of the guitar.At this point I think it’s worth mentioning the issue of tempo in Scarlatti. The G minor Sonata, Kk8, is marked Allegro, which seems very odd. Kirkpatrick is I think right to say: ‘Scarlatti’s [tempo] directions seem to have but little bearing on the actual speed at which the piece is to be taken; rather they serve as indications of rhythmic character. Most Scarlatti pieces are commonly taken too fast. A Presto, for example, may not necessarily refer to tempo. Never does it indicate a pseudo-virtuoso exhibition of mere dexterity. On the other hand it may better be interpreted as lively and alert, capable of immediate response to nuances of wit or to lightning changes of expression … Many Scarlatti Allegros and Andantes approach each other in actual speed.’With that in mind, we come to the Sonata in G major, Kk13, marked Presto, and also with an Alla breve time signature. Take this too fast and you’re soon in for big trouble. Scarlatti’s favourite tricks of hand-crossing and repeated notes are presented simultaneously, all the while imitating the sound of castanets. It is terrific keyboard-writing, and you can understand from this sonata alone the affinity between Scarlatti and the music of the Spanish composers who came two hundred years later (Granados, Albéniz, Falla).My next grouping contains only three sonatas. The Sonata in B minor, Kk27, is well known and at times drastically simple. Surely this is one of the first examples of minimalism in music—when Scarlatti produces a ‘loop’, twice repeating the same thing for six bars at a time. The hands swap over twice in the middle of that loop (something Longo removed) which makes it more understandable but still perplexing. Many pianists drown this piece in pedal, which I’m not keen on (although I probably also played it that way over forty years ago).The Sonata in D major, Kk140, is in the opinion of the harpsichordist Scott Ross (who made the first complete recording of Scarlatti’s sonatas) one of the most difficult of the 555 sonatas. Each section begins with a short fanfare. I once tried this piece on an organ using all the reedy and brassy stops, and the opening sounded fantastic! Then we have a pause after reaching the dominant. What comes next? An echoing fanfare in the remote key of C major—a stroke of genius! Another pause. Then a more extended section with treacherous double sixths and huge hand-crossing leaps. One can almost imagine some rather elegant cavalry exercises taking place in the palace courtyard where Scarlatti was teaching his pupil, Princess Maria Barbara.For once I have chosen two adjacent sonatas, playing next the Sonata in D minor, Kk141. This is a wild piece, true to the demonic spirit of its key signature. If you have to perform it on a piano with a lazy action, you’re sunk. The flurry of repeated notes imitates the tremolo of a mandolin—an instrument that flourished especially in Naples in Scarlatti’s day. The left-hand chords should be snatched from the keyboard with a corresponding gesture. As in the previous sonata, Scarlatti plays with pauses and makes us wonder what will come next. The section beginning in F major in bar 53 winds up in the most terrific way, culminating in big leaps for both hands. After the double bar, the tremolo effect continues in a wonderful progression of harmonies. At the end I do something not in the score, inspired by listening to Scott Ross: I repeat that final wind-up section an extra time, giving the imagined dancers one more chance to strut their stuff.The Sonata in F minor, Kk69, has been a favourite ever since I played it as a child. I still love its expressive counterpoint, the long lines, the persistent dotted rhythm that is nevertheless very gentle, and how the second section gradually builds in intensity until bar 53. It was when playing this sonata as a teenager that I first realized—thanks to my teacher who had purchased Kirkpatrick’s edition of all the Scarlatti sonatas in facsimile—how editors had ‘cleaned up’ Scarlatti over the centuries. I had learned this piece from an edition popular in the 1960s (and still available today): The Graded Scarlatti, edited by Marthe Morhange-Motchane. She had taken as her source the Longo edition. If you compare that with the facsimile (or with the Heugel edition by Kenneth Gilbert), you will see the differences. One of the best moments of this sonata has been eliminated—the arpeggiated chords in the last two bars (as we have in Kk8). The tierce de Picardie ending (which I do only on the repeat to make it more effective) has also been removed, as has much else along the way.Presto, quanto sia possibile (Presto, as much as possible) is the tempo indication for the Sonata in G major, Kk427. The problem, as so often, is that it’s easy to take the opening lines too fast as they’re not nearly so complicated as what comes later on. To avoid having to change your tempo midway through, the speed needs to be appropriate for bar 17 onwards. And the fortissimo chords need to come as a huge surprise, without any preparation—like somebody jumping out at you from behind a door. The whole thing has to be played with a lot of sparkle and humour.The Sonata in A minor, Kk109, is a gem. It’s the only one in all 555 that is marked Adagio (in the Parma manuscript the indication is Andante-Adagio). There is definitely a Moorish influence in its character of mournful melancholy. An adaption exists of this sonata as a Portuguese ‘fado’ song, and listening to it you can hear how feelings of resignation and fatefulness are present in its melody. The appoggiaturas, the descending sighs in which the hands cross over each other, the sad triplet figures towards the end of each section—all of these are clues to the overall interpretation. If you observe both repeats, this is one of the longest of Scarlatti’s sonatas.To cheer us up, there can’t be a better piece than the Sonata in D major, Kk96. Here a whole orchestra is at work. Many elements that we hear in other sonatas (a trumpet fanfare, mandolin-like repeated notes, athletic leaps) are all present, but are now combined to make a brilliant tour de force. Shifts between major and minor modes, a favourite Scarlatti device, are used to great effect, as are clashing B flats and B naturals (bars 68 and 75—once again eradicated by Longo!). The counterpoint at the top of the second section should not be glossed over in a rush to get to the end. Kirkpatrick calls the whole thing an ‘unprecedented display of spontaneous fantasy’.If tracks 12 to 15 (Kk69 to Kk96) form another group of four sonatas on this album, then the Sonata in E major, Kk380, is my encore (as it often is in recital). Its popularity is justly deserved, and I have loved it since childhood. What makes it such a moving piece? It has a courtly elegance from the first note to the last. Tender feelings try to express themselves in the most regal of gestures, yet are never allowed to go outside into the normal world. The horns keep reminding you of that.Angela Hewitt © 2016