Javier Perianes BLASCO DE NEBRA Piano Sonatas

Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750-1784) was a keyboard player as well as a composer, and an assistant to his father José, who was organist at Seville Cathedral. Manuel is reckoned to have composed around 170 works in his short career, but of those only 30 pieces, all for either harpsichord or fortepiano, survive. Javier Peranes plays eight of them on this beautiful disc, six sonatas and two of the rustic, three-movement pastorelas. Perianes uses a modern concert grand, and shows that while Blasco de Nebra was influenced by the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, most of all – his sonatas all adopt the same two-movement, slow- fast scheme – he was well aware of what was happening musically elsewhere in Europe in the 1770s. Blasco de Nebra's expressive world is far more searching than anything in Scarlatti's 500-odd sonatas: the opening Adagio of his Sonata No 1 in C minor, for instance, sounds almost like a Chopin nocturne, and elsewhere his harmonic world can be a richly mysterious one. Perianes sometimes lards the music with a bit too much of that expressiveness, but otherwise his performances are excellent, communicating a real sense of revelation, of bringing a distinctive composer's voice to a 21st-century audience for the first time. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)