Background to Scarlatti

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 328, 5 October 1945, Page 8

Background to Scarlatti

SOME brave person, determined to pin down the intangible, has annotated the Scarlatti sonatas now being played weekly from 1YX. A little thing in F sharp minor was full of "passion and grandeur" and an "almost orchestral effect." The orchestral effect, though by no means reminiscent of Stokowski, was perhaps just enough to give the lie to the person who described the sound of the harpsichord as a "performance on a bird cage with a toasting fork." Passion and grandeur are not qualities usually

associated with that polished cosmopolite, Domenico Scarlatti, whom one imagines meeting every situation with easy witeven his obesity which forced him to give up the hand-crossing tricks of his earlier sonatas, But, as Jane Austen says, "A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world,’ and anyone has a right to find passion and grandeur in Scarlatti in F sharp minor if they can. "Listen for the carefree gambolling of the left hand," the instruction before a trifle in G major, fell strangely on the ears of piano students who know what agonies of care go into playing Scarlatti’s litthe gambols. Yet any vicarious anxiety they might be feeling on behalf of Wanda Landowska who has recorded these sonatas would be surely quite misplaced, for she has the situation completely under control.