the works of scarlatti

[youjean88]

hello,

i recently began to have interest in the works of D.scarlatti. although i have had most of my questions through searching on the web, i still have a few that i would like clarification on.

#1 are all. most of his keyboard works sonatas?
#2 if so, is there a good/ok collection of his sonatas anywhere? i have seen the schirmer collection but that collection only has 60 of his sonatas included. is this edition not any good or is it good enough?

#3 to anyone who owns the schirmer edition. is it a collection of 60 of his most important sonatas?

thank you all for your time

[Bob]

I'm not thinking of anything besides sonatas I've heard of for Scarlatti.  Yeah... It's always "Scarlatti sonatas" stuck together.

Kirkpatrick is the edition to get.   Two volumes.   I think that's what you're looking at.

I'm not sure the date on it, but I think they found more sonatas.  Up to 600 of them now I think.

[youjean88]

is the kirkpatrick edition the one from schirmer?

does the schirmer edition have 60 of his most important sonatas?

[Bob]

I think it's Schirmer.  Tan/yellow cover. 

I'm not sure.  But it's Kirkpatrick.  I would imagine he picked the top ones.  I do remember looking for a few that weren't in there.  And I remember something about the cataloging numbers being off. 

[daro]

Kirkpatrick chose the 60 sonatas for analytical reasons to accompany his landmark 1953 book on Scarlatti, and later handed them off to Schirmer for publication. There are complete bound editions out there (I think Kalmus has one) but they're also available for download at https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Scarlatti,_Domenico; IMSLP has both the Longo edition, and also a couple of hundred sonatas edited by the harpsichordist John Sankey.

I don't believe any of the existing manuscripts were actually written by Scarlatti himself; they're all copies or copies of copies, and some of the copying appears to have been done by people of dubious musical knowledge, so you'll find any number of variants.

The catalog numbering by Kirkpatrick is not "off"; it differs from Longo because part of what made Kirkpatrick's work so pioneering was that he was the first person to systematically attempt to put these works in their true chronological order (and also support his contention that the sonatas were composed in pairs).

[Bob]

One I looked at was different than New Groves. Both for K and L I think.  It was a long time ago but I do remember having to hunt down the right numbers.

[mikey6]

There isn't that much choice for the sonatas - Ricordi have an edition of the complete sonatas in 12 volumes which at last look cost something like 50 pounds each.
The Schirmer is a good start (and probably the best Schirmer out there).
There are a few other works, I've read of some suites and of course the 'cat fugue'.

[Bob]

I remembering hearing (probably here) that one edition was very expensive.

You could take several recordings and compare which ones they do.