The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti long seemed to be a sort of isolated manifestation of brilliance, but keyboardists and scholars have begun to unearth works in a similar style, many of them by composers directly inspired by Scarlatti himself. One of these is Pietro Domenico Paradies (or Paradisi), a Neapolitan who, finding limited success as an opera composer on his home turf, moved to London and began cultivating its growing middle-class markets. Among the fruits of his efforts were a publication of harpsichord sonatas, collected here along with a concerto that is not a keyboard-and-orchestra work but merely a solo piece resembling an Italian concerto formally (akin to Bach's Italian Concerto). The sonatas show a heavy influence from Scarlatti, with virtuoso elements including crossed-hand passages. Paradies tends to trot these out during a movement's final flourishes, and in general the music here tends to apply Scarlattian formulas, lacking Scarlatti's untrammeled brilliance and the Spanish flavor that gives his music such zest. Paradies' strong point was his recognition of the emerging currents in musical structure. Each sonata is in two movements, but these vary from straight binary forms to more elaborate schemes in which the tonic and dominant poles receive additional weight. The composer effectively puts this together with the virtuoso aspect, and harpsichordist Filippo Emanuele Ravizza, playing a copy of a vigorous Taskin instrument of 1769, has plenty to do and plenty to work with. The music will please but not bowl over anyone who likes Scarlatti. Notes by the performer are in Italian and rather tentative English.
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