Prolific Scarlatti

Domenico Scarlatti was a famous Baroque harpsichordist (born in 1685: the same year as J.S. Bach and Handel!) who is famous for his five hundred fifty-five keyboard Sonatas. They are knows for their virtuosity and their sparkling energy. One of their particular technical demands is frequent hand crossovers which he employed liberally (…until his increasingly ample girth prevented him in old age.) Scarlatti is so distinctive. He was an Italian living in Spain and Portugal, working for the nobility there. That’s a lot of energetic musical culture wrapped up into one guy! I have found that his music doesn’t play too well on a lot of upright pianos because of brilliant repeating notes. Grand pianos have gravity to help get that hammer back down in position to spring back fast enough, not like uprights, whose hammers travel horizontally. Scarlatti’s repeated notes are always obvious, as in his Sonata in D minor, K. 141 (see this unbelievable version by Martha Argerich) Other things that happen often in Scarlatti’s music are sudden key changes to the parallel major or minor (like jumping from D major to D minor without a modulation) and those famous trills that often happen at the end notes of the two halves of the Sonatas.