Interpratation in Scarlatti

[imbetter]

When playing the music of J.S. Bach, the good performances involve lots of person material such as ornamentation and changing things around at the repeats. I was wondering when playing the music of Scarlatti, would you also add a lot of these personal additions (he composed in the baroque era but was stylistically influenced by Spanish and Italian music) because I don't hear much of it done.

What are your opinions?

[weissenberg2]

I don't think you should add ornamentations since his music sounds like a mix between Spanish guitar music and Italian arias and in neither of those you can improvise ornaments (as far as I am aware of) but I think you should NEVER drop ornaments.

[daro]

I don't think you should add ornamentations since his music sounds like a mix between Spanish guitar music and Italian arias and in neither of those you can improvise ornaments (as far as I am aware of) but I think you should NEVER drop ornaments.

I would disagree with this. Based on admittedly non-recent perusal of recent Scarlatti scholarship, I seem to recall that not only is the ornamentation pretty much up for grabs, but repeat markings themselves may never have been meant to be taken literally; instead, at the end of each section, a performer like Scarlatti would then have played a whole new improvisation on the previous themes.

[birba]

I definitely second that reply.

[weissenberg2]

,