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Duende

Domenico Scarlatti is thought to have composed five hundred and fifty five keyboard sonatas in his time (1685-1757). None quite reach seven minutes' duration, so they're brief pieces - but there are so many. How best to approach this body of work? Some intrepid harpsichordists and pianists have recorded them all, with Scott Ross's complete set the first to be released, in 1988. Wonderful as they can be, I don't know that I'll ever want to try listening to every single one. A less serious alternative would be to try listening to them all at once.

For me, the much more appealing option is to trust a performer to put together a judiciously-curated selection. As mentioned before, one of my first ever classical CD purchases was such a set, bringing together eighteen sonatas played by Andreas Staier. I'd picked the disc up having read an endorsement of Scarlatti in a poem: "It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti / condensed so much music into so few bars / with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence / never a boast or a see-here..." (Basil Bunting, 'Briggflats', part IV). I still enjoy that album now, but the '90s recording can sound a little thin and dry, and I was keen to find a recital disc with a more vivid sonic presence. 

I found exactly what I sought on Skip Sempé's 2007 album Duende (a title alluding to the Neapolitan-born composer's long residence in Spain), which brings together seventeen sonatas in its sixty-three minute running time. Mine is a used copy acquired via ebay a year or two ago. It's a wonderfully hot-blooded affair with abundant vurtuosity in evidence. On four of the tracks, Sempé took the unorthodox step of bringing in a second harpsichordist - Olivier Fortin - to provide a semi-improvised "continuo" accompaniment, thereby obtaining a louder and fuller sound. Whether that has historical precendent is debatable, but to my ears it works very well indeed.

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