Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was born in the autumn of 1685 in Naples in the family of the composer-star of the local opera school Alessandro Scarlatti and his wife Antonia. He began his career in Naples, then a part of Spain, where he spent another decade in Italy and most of his life at the Portuguese and Spanish courts: when his patroness, the infante Barbara, became the Spanish queen, Scarlatti followed her to Madrid.
Scarlatti's journey began with vocal music, in the shadow of his famous father. After his death, Scarlatti focused on miniature keyboard sonatas and created more than half a thousand works in this genre. Unlike the lengthy Beethoven three- or four-part sonatas by Scarlatti, it is a small single-part piece consisting of two sections and sustained in one affect ranging from bravura to poetic melancholy. Scarlatti's best pieces were created late when he was 53 years old (for comparison: his peers Bach and Handel had already written two-thirds of the music that went down in history by that age). Moreover, according to American harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, a performer and major researcher of Scarlatti music, more than half of the sonatas were written between 67 and 71.
Sonata in D major K490 is marked cantabile (in Italian it means "singing"). Its most characteristic elements are the first exclamation like fanfare and a trill that turns into a falling gamma-like passageway. Later it will be repeated in a direct and then in a mirror (ascending) movement. This is a later work: most likely, K490 was written in the mid-1750s. Sonatas of this period are very diverse: among them are innocent bucolics, sensual revelations, mournful monologues and decorative trinkets. They were written in the atmosphere of court entertainments of King Ferdinand VI: games, costumed serenades performed in the palace orange gardens, launches of a miniature funny flotilla on the river Tahoe, hunting, fishing, fireworks and music (the queen sang a duet with a friend of Scarlatti, Farinelli's castration, or played on the harpsichord).
In the mid-1750s, the harpsichord - the main baroque keyboards, for which Scarlatti's music was apparently intended - began to give way to another historical prototype of the piano: the hammer clavier (also known as the hammer piano). Sonatas were played on both instruments, and because of differences in mechanics the same things sounded differently. About a hundred years ago, among musicians playing ancient music, a new direction emerged - an authentic, or historically informed, performance. Authentic performers sought to restore the musical practices of the dormantic era and studied numerous vintage documents to understand how to decipher baroque musical texts "correctly", play decorations, line up phrases, choose the pace.
Among the performances chosen here for comparison are some vivid examples of historically informed performance on the harpsichord and hammerclaver, as well as on the modern piano.
Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911-1984) is a legendary Scarlattian, the author of a ten-year-old reference book on Scarlatti and a catalogue of his sonatas (in his honour they are given numbers that begin with the letters Kk or K). This recording was made on a 1950 harpsichord made by Master John Challis of Detroit. In the abstract, Kirkpatrick writes that the instrument is not an end in itself; the harpsichord is only a tool for creating sound illusions related to the world and the many stylistic origins of Scarlatti's music:
"I'm not interested in the harpsichord in itself; I don't feel obliged, like a conscientious vacuum cleaner trader, to demonstrate all its functions. For me, this is one of the many instruments that can be used to create music.
A similar approach to the harpsichord was taken by Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), the first great harpsichordist of the twentieth century. She rehabilitated the instrument, which had been forgotten since baroque times, and made it one of the main characters of the modern scene. Clavesin, created by the famous Pleyel company under her leadership, is one of the first attempts to restore the appearance of the "extinct" instrument. However, it is not so much a scientific attempt as a romantic one: a very large, sonic one, with a metal frame and seven register-switching pedals with pellets.
The piano is an exotic hybrid of piano and harpsichord, covered in leather, and has a powerful string tension, which does not stand up to any criticism from the point of view of authenticity.
Landovskaya's instrument is more of a fantasy about how the harpsichord looked and sounded in the 18th century: this kind of voluntaristic approach is unthinkable in the context of the contemporary relationship to ancient music. Nevertheless, Landovskaya's personality and her recordings are so unique that they continue to be relevant to harpsichordists today. From a few seconds onwards, we recognize not only the singing, strangely stretching sound of her "Pleyel", but also the impeccable rhythm, sometimes reaching to the point of percussion, as well as the coloristic diversity of the cat