Angela Hewitt DOMENICO SCARLATTI Sonatas

Angela Hewitt has chosen 17 of Domenico Scarlatti’s super-abundant keyboard sonatas (he wrote more than 550) to create a second engaging recital following her 2015 volume. Again, she has cleverly organised her selection into satisfying subgroups linked by key and mood. We begin in declamatory mode with the theatrical sonata in D major Kk491 followed by the sultry Iberian flavours of Kk492 and Kk146 and so on. In another group, we hear sonatas Kk63 and Kk64, chosen to encourage amateur players to try this sparkling and inventive repertoire and yet another reason to admire this most accomplished of pianists. (Stephen Pritchard / The Guardian)

Recording a first album of Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti in February 2015 was such a great experience that, inevitably, I couldn’t stop there. Not with another 540 or so to choose from! It wasn’t easy to select seventeen for this second recording, simply because there are so many wonderful ones—but perhaps the pleasure was even greater than the first time as many of them were new to my repertoire.

The more I read about Domenico Scarlatti, the more I realize how little we know about him. Often key events in a composer’s life give clues to the interpretation of a work. That hardly applies in the case of Scarlatti.

What I do find is that by playing not just a few but many of his sonatas, and especially in public (because, at least for me, they gain an extra dimension in performance), the more you start to comprehend what exactly makes this music so appealing, so unique, so dazzling. (Angela Hewitt)