Search - Domenico Scarlatti, Wanda Landowska :: Scarlatti: Sonates

Landowska's Scarlatti in enhanced sound quality.

John Austin | Kangaroo Ground, Australia | 05/04/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The pioneering work done by the diminutive Polish keyboard player Wanda Landowska in reviving the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti was enormously influential in its time and recordings of it can still be heard today. Collectors will find at least two reissues of her Scarlatti recordings on the market. One is the Pavilion/Pearl 2 CD set. It contains all her Scarlatti recordings plus a few bonus extras. I have already provided a review of it. This Angel single CD set appeared earlier and contains a selection of 24 of the 40 or so sonatas she recorded.Balancing the incompleteness is the better sound quality in this issue. Angel's engineers have discretely brightened and polished the sound of the originals, rendering an aural image that more convincingly suggests a harpsichord rather than a giant barrel organ and compensating for the inadequacies of the 1930s technology at the original recording sessions. Landowska's romantic, picturesque and sometimes fanciful notes, written to accompany the original issue of twenty of these sonatas, are not reproduced in either of these modern reissues. Lionel Salter, himself an eminent harpsichord player and authority on Landowska, provides the notes for this Angel CD. The picture on the front depicts Landowska gazing at the view from the recital hall attached to her home near Paris.This CD is one of the few to be awarded a rosette in the "Penguin Guide to Classical Compact Discs", the reviewer asserting Landowska's "playing has more character than most other harpsichord players put together"."

Scarlatti's Invention

Classicalman | Pontiac, MI | 10/06/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If you love the harpsichord, and you want to listen to endlessly inventive music, and to an endlessly brilliant interpreter, then STOP! Landowska gives life to Scarlatti's brilliance. True, the sound is aged, but you'll soon understand why you are thinking she had recorded all of Scarlatti's sonatas!"

More than historical interest

Eloi | Ely, NV USA | 05/05/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As another reviewer noted, the sound quality here is as good as one can expect--though I'm sure the EMI engineers could have figured out a way to eliminate the anti-aircraft background at the end of the first half of K 490!



Landowska takes few if any repeats, and that's why there are 24 sonatas in 69.23 minutes. In addition, her tempos are fast in most--only K 159 was notably slower than is typical of more recent recordings. Did I say K 159? It's probably the most often recorded of Scarlatti's sonatas, and points to the fact that the sonatas on this album are almost all part of the informal canon of the "Best of Scarlatti" approach.



But complaining of this is like complaining that Shakespeare's plays are so full of cliches. Not just the selection of sonatas but the familiar way she plays them make it clear just how influential Wanda Landowska was.



All Scarlatti fans will enjoy this album, especially those who hear Scarlatti as a colourful and more often than not, lightweight composer.



Oh yeah, the notes: Lionel Salter's 1993 notes in English are a sonata-by-sonata program guide that are useful when he sticks to technical stuff. But for those willing to wade through the French, Andre Tubeuf's essay provides a temporal and stylistic context for Landowska that's truly HIP.





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--eloi88"