What are the five best sonatas in Kirkpatrick's sixty Scarlatti sonatas book. I know most of them have no more value than excercise pieces, but I want the ones that sound musically the best. thank you
I think he is a very good composer, Any thoughts on why he is not more well known?
Are you joking? Scarlatti is the most inventive keyboard composer of the baroque (yes, even more than J.S. Bach), arguably of all time. There is not a single sonata of his that can be said to “have no more value than excercise pieces”. Where did you get this from? Shall we investigate what Kirkpatrick has to say about them?This music ranges from the courtly to the savage, from an almost saccharine urbanity to an acrid violence. Its gaiety is all the more intense for an undertone of tragedy. Its moments of meditative melancholy are at times overwhelmed by a surge of extrovert operatic passion. Most particularly he has expressed that part of his life which was lived in Spain. There is hardly an aspect of Spanish life, of Spanish popular music and dance, that has not found itself a place in the microcosm that Scarlatti created with his sonatas. No Spanish composer, not even Manuel de Falla in the 20th century, has expressed the essence of his native land as completely as did the foreigner Scarlatti. He has captured the click of castanets, the strumming of guitars, the thud of muffled drums, the harsh bitter wail of gypsy lament, the overwhelming gaiety of the village band, and above all the wiry tension of the Spanish dance.[…]“One of Scarlatti’s favourite melodic devices, even dearer to him than to his contemporaries, is the progressive expansion of intervals which makes one voice suddenly split in two. Generally one half remains stationary while the other half moves away from it like a dancer measuring off the space of a stage against the stationary spinning of his partner in the middle. This perpetual splitting off of one or two voices into the outlining of other voices produces a frequent confusion of identity. The voices are continually transforming themselves, as if in a dream. They desert their own planes to outline other planes, to hint, as it were, at the existence of other personages, to indicate depth as well as outline of space, in a continually shifting perspective in which these imaginary personages are unpredicatably appearing and disappearing.”[…]“Scarlatti harmonies are no longer chords or meeting points of combined melodies; they are degrees of tonality. For this reason they develop a behaviour entirely their own. It is natural in the light and airy texture of Scarlatti’s harmony that his chords be not subject to the same laws of gravity, so to speak as those of Bach and Rameau, that his basses transposed to upper parts behave like basses and not like the upper parts they seem to be. […] In Scarlatti’s architecture stone need not be piled on stone any more than in Juvarra’s theatre drawings; stresses and tensions, balances and counterweights will hold the structure upright. No 18th century treatise on thoroughbass, nor any 19th century harmony book will ever “explain” a Scarlatti sonata properly or account for the “original and happy freaks” that are really not freaks at all but parts of a perfectly consistent and unified musical language.”[…] There is no limit to the imaginary sounds evoked by Scarlatti’s harpsichord. Many of them extend far beyond the domain of musical instruments into an impressionistic transcription of the sounds of daily life, of street cries, church bells, tapping of dancing feet, fireworks, artillery, in such varied and fluid form that any attempt to describe them precisely in words results in colourful and embarrassing nonsense. For me nearly all of Scarlatti’s music has some root in the experiences and impression of real life, on in the fantasies of the dream world, but in a fashion that ultimately can be stated only in music.[…]The Scarlatti sonatas tell no story, at least not in a narrative sense; if they did, they would always have to tell it twice, once in each half. They have no exact visual or verbal equivalents, but they are an endlessly varied record of experience on constantly shifting levels of gesture, dance and declamation, and remembered sound. They ridicule translation into words, but, with all the vitality that is in them they resist any attribution of abstractness”(R. K.: Domenico Scarlatti - Princeton) So, shame on you for trying to bring these wonderful works down to the level of Czerny, Hanon & co. Have a look here for my favourites. (I am afraid you are going to find a bit more than five there though).https://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,2339.msg20064.html#msg20064(favourite sonatas).Best wishes,Bernhard.
I'll just throw in K296 as another recommendation, heartrending and passionate .... aaaaahhh!
QuoteI'll just throw in K296 as another recommendation, heartrending and passionate .... aaaaahhh!I agree absolutely, I felt in love with this piece after hearing the Zacharias' dramatic version. I am learning it currently, but have to regret that my teacher doesn't like it.
Topic: five best scarlatti sonatas 