Scarlatti Sonata K544 Trills

[jess12121]

Hi,
I'm preparing Scarlatti's Sonata in Bb major K544 but I'm confused as to how to play the trills. I have a Henle urtext edition of the score where it shows every trill as a mordent. However, a lot of the recordings seem to do different things and my teacher has changed her mind a couple of times so I'd like to hear some more opinions please as I'm due to perform the piece in concert in about a months time!!

Here are a few recordings:

As you can hear in the 2nd recording some of the trills are started on the note and played as lower mordents..some as upper. In some other recordings the trill starts on the upper note which would be more typical of the standard practice but it doesn't always sound that nice..it can often interrupt the melodic line where we have the same note before which then makes me wonder if I should start on the actual note instead of on the upper note when starting on the upper note creates two notes of the same pitch next to each other.. I've tried playing it with lower mordents but it can become confusing as to which note to go down to because of the accidentals..

I'd apreciate any feedback, especially from anyone who has played the piece before!

Many thanks

[outin]

There is always some controvercy when it comes to ornaments in Scarlatti, because he didn't leave any explanations on them and seems to use ornament markings in an inconsistent way in his manuscripts. I would be inclined to go with Kirkpatrick on this one: They are all meant to be trills. Played on the beat and I would start on the upper note, even though it's sometimes trickier to make it fluent. If you make the trills crisp and airy (I have no better words, hope you get my meaning), it sounds nice even when there are two notes of the same pictch.

When it comes to Scarlatti, the interpretations have a lot of variations and especially older recordings sound very different to what I read from the most reliable editions. But it's understandable, since they probably only had access to the Longo editions that were edited a lot and are more based on his ideas than the original manuscripts.

[jess12121]

Ok that's great, thanks so much!