Almost everything about this eight-disc set of "chamber" sonatas seems to conspire against Clementi, not helping to further his cause at all, despite the best intentions of pianist
Pietro Spada, who has spent much of his career researching, cataloging, re-publishing, and recording Clementi's entire oeuvre. Most of these works were published by Clementi as being for piano or harpsichord with violin or flute and sometimes cello as optional accompanying instruments. Only the Op. 15 sonatas were meant to be more like the true duo sonatas of the era. The non-keyboard parts are weakly written, most often just repeating or playing exactly what's already in the keyboard part, which explains why most are never performed. It is hard to find excellent chamber musicians willing to play such un-inventive music. The violinist playing here,
Vincenzo Bolognese, starts out not very far above the student or amateur level, although he does improve as the set goes on and when cellist Andrea Bergamelli joins in. For all his efforts on behalf of Clementi, however,
Spada's playing doesn't come across as much more than adequate, either, try as he might to bring more depth of feeling and color to the music. Some of this has to do with the other musicians' performances, and a lot has to do with the sound quality of the recordings. In the first three discs and the beginning of the fourth, the sound is ugly, with the violin in the foreground, close enough to hear perfectly every mistake of intonation or articulation that
Bolognese makes. After that, the sound improves, but not much, with the result that the piano -- the heart of the music -- is almost never in the spotlight. There is little sense of ensemble or cohesion either in the sound or the performances. It's the last two discs, all the sonatas for piano with flute and cello, where the sound and performances are the best, making a much better case for Clementi's music than any of the others.
There is also a lack of information about the music in the meager notes included with the set. Given
Spada's research, more expansive observations on why some of the sonatas have middle movements for keyboard alone or why Clementi stopped writing these before 1800 (or why he wrote them at all), would have been nice for those who actually have an interest in the composer. (Also note that the tempo markings on disc 2, tracks 13 and 14, are reversed.)
With all of these shortcomings, it's hard to listen to this set and concentrate on the music itself, trying to find the better qualities of Clementi's writing: how pianistic it is, how it improves as he matures, and how it compares to his contemporaries' --
Haydn and
Mozart -- keyboard sonatas. The music is very much a child of its time. It closely follows Classical sonata forms and has an easygoing charm, tunefulness, and even occasionally a bit of dramatic tension. When all is said and done, unfortunately, this is a set likely to be purchased only by libraries and Clementi completists.