Andrea Bacchetti’s pioneering voyage of discovery amongst the
undiscovered gems of Italian keyboard moves to a new level with this
release. If you liked his recording of unusual sonatas by Benedetto Marcello
(see
review), then this disc goes further down the
same page with Domenico Scarlatti.
These performances have been prepared in a new edition by Andrea
Bacchetti and Mario Marcarini based on original sources. The booklet goes
into some detail on this subject, but to cut a long story short the National
Library of St Mark’s in Venice holds a collection of codices; scores
by various composers, handed down by complex and sometimes mysterious
historical chains of events. There are no autograph manuscripts of
Scarlatti’s sonatas, so such copies are like Shakespeare First Folios
to musicians. The booklet doesn’t go further into what this new
edition might have to offer over any of the others, but any scholarly and
practical work which takes us closer to the closest of sources has to be of
interest.
Andrea Bacchetti can once again be found in the Fazioli Concert
Hall, bringing a Fazioli Grand Piano model F728 to life with these musical
jewels. Recordings from this source haven’t always been equally
brilliant, but this is a very fine piano recording with plenty of detail,
without being too close to the instrument for comfort. Bacchetti’s
performances sometimes have a wistful poetry to them which takes us into
entirely different worlds to those to which we might have become used. Take
the first track, the
Sonata K174, whose timing of 8:18 you might
think was a typo. No indeed, Bacchetti slows the music into something
lyrical and picturesque, and entirely in contrast to the double-tempo
version by Carlo Grante on a 6 CD set from the Music and Arts Programs of
America label, CD-1236, which comes in at 4:44 (see
review). I only pick on this as one of the extreme
cases, and in order to compare like with like when it comes to piano rather
than harpsichord or anything else. Bacchetti is usually more spacious in his
approach but he is not always slow. With the next
Sonata K 171 his
timing is 3:04 against Grante’s 2:56, so it’s not wide variances
all of the time.
Trying to find overlaps with collections of Scarlatti programmes for
comparison can be frustrating, there are just so many of them. A pretty
reliable piano series of the sonatas has been released by the Naxos label,
and if you look for the
Sonata K 164 you will find it played by
Chu-Fang Huang on 8.572107 (see
review). Huang goes for the more familiar dance-like
approach, a light touch and lilting rhythms which move the music along while
allowing for the dark and light of Scarlatti’s little dramas and
cadences. The timing here is 4:24 to Bacchetti’s 7:47, so you know
we’re looking at another transformation. You wonder how it can work at
all at such a pace, but Bacchetti does it somehow, taking the
Scarlatti’s simplest of means and making them even simpler by reducing
the rhythmic element to a two-part invention which describes ripples on calm
evening waters rather than the white peaks of a racing tide. There’s
no saying which version is better, they are so different as to create two
almost entirely different pieces of music.
Bacchetti shines a light on Scarlatti’s music which seems to
me at times entirely new, and with no enlightenment to be had from the
booklet about his approach to these performances I decided to go the extra
mile and ask him why he went for these tempi. This is Bacchetti’s
fourth in-depth single composer exploration after his work on
Cherubini, Galuppi and
Marcello, and his long reflection on these works
has included comparisons with other theorists and interpreters as well as
immersing himself in the original extant material. Bacchetti sums up his
performances as a synthesis of this wide background and detailed examination
of the sources of the music and its times - something which has brought him
‘inside’ these pieces as much as anyone. Interpretation of these
works is of course something which remains intuitive and intangible, and as
we don’t really know how fast or exactly in which manner these pieces
were played there is no-one who can say Bacchetti is wrong in his
performance decisions. I for one salute his occasional abandonment of
accepted trends. With the utter conviction of these performances there are
none which seem ‘wrong’, and certainly not after the initial
adjustment has been made to your expectations. The sustaining qualities of
the modern concert grand piano may have something to do with the
‘feel’ of such performances, and it is harder to imagine them
being particularly acceptable on a harpsichord or other contemporaneous
keyboard instrument, but this again is all subjective. We’ve long come
to accept Bach on piano, with some tempi far removed from anything likely to
have been considered realistic in 1710. The results here are often
surprising, certainly refreshing, and invariably crystalline in their sheer
clarity of communication, elegance of structure and content, and
that’s enough for me.
Described on the CD as ‘bonus tracks’, the last four
pieces are sonatas by Antonio Soler. His style can bear comparison with
Scarlatti, though connoisseurs will always be able to tell the difference.
Soler’s harmonies and musical material develop different colours to
Scarlatti’s, and putting the two together is a fascinating
juxtaposition in this context. You can sense Bacchetti’s difference in
response to Soler’s little eccentricities, which have a naïve
aspect while at the same time being exploratory and progressive. The lively
sonatas of tracks 11 and 14 have an attractively crisp touch, and the two in
between are approached with restraint but a good deal of dynamic shading and
exquisite lines.
Once again, Andrea Bacchetti confounds our image of two masters of
the southern European keyboard, but in such a way as to open our ears to new
possibilities within their art.
Dominy Clements
