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Although I took piano lessons for 10 years, Domenico Scarlatti was not part of my musical education. Some of the 18th-century Italian composer’s 555 keyboard sonatas are eminently playable by a middling piano student such as I was. But I only encountered them during my college years, when I heard the young Peter Blanchette and Peter Michelini (later known as the Archguitar Duo) on the platform of a Boston T station, playing Scarlatti – on guitars. Their cassette album became a staple listen for me.
It’s not hard to find piano recordings of Scarlatti’s sonatas – from Vladimir Horowitz, the composer’s greatest 20th-century champion, to the contemporary pianist Lucas Debargue. But the new album from Matteo Mela and Lorenzo Micheli, Scarlatti: 12 Sonatas, takes me back to my early encounter with the music. Why? Because Mela and Micheli are guitarists. And very expressive ones, as this album makes clear.
Scarlatti wrote these sonatas for the keyboard. Yet as Micheli writes in his liner notes, “the voice of the guitar permeates Scarlatti’s music.”
Regardless of instrument, it’s always interesting to see how musicians select from this vast corpus.
International Influences
This set includes some relatively familiar sonatas along with others that are less often recorded. In either case, they have room for wide ranges of interpretation. Mela and Micheli demonstrate this from the first track, playing their arrangement of the K. 24 with a startling proto-romantic freedom. Guitar strings enable a wider range of timbres than piano keys – and vastly wider than those of a harpsichord. Here they range from liquid to nasal as the musicians vary volume and technique.
Micheli’s liner notes make a good case for the Spanish connection, as well as for the sonatas’ more-than-incidental affinity for the guitar. He also discusses how Scarlatti’s sonatas nonetheless came relatively late to the universe of the guitar (as compared with, say, Bach).
There’s Spanish-style passion in the strummed chords and scale-sweeping runs of K. 99. The familiar K. 455 zips by, with crisp clarity of technique rescuing it from becoming a mere demonstration of dexterity.
The tempo is more controlled in the intricate K. 202. And K. 87 gets a haunting, harp-like reading, the guitarists bringing out layered depths in this solemn, beautiful piece.
K. 32, a quiet miniature, floats like a spiderweb in the breeze. Mela and Micheli take a thoughtful approach to K. 162, alternating stately gentility with dance-hall gusto.
Scarlatti for 12 Strings
The duo gets playful with K. 531, one of Scarlatti’s best-known sonatas, taking what I think are a few decorative liberties (and why not?). They’re so in sync in their sturdy reading of this dynamic work that I kept forgetting I was listening to two musicians and not one. The same is true for their eloquent, sensitive reading of another of the better-known sonatas, K. 466.
K. 519 is Scarlatti at his most forceful. At moments it can be almost violent. The guitarists hit it full-tilt, ending with an expressive rubato.
They conclude the quick K. 386, which closes the album, on an abrupt staccato that I couldn’t help smiling at.
K. 202 is a good case study of Scarlatti’s inventive and sometimes unexpected harmonies and chord progressions. (Indeed Micheli notes these sonatas’ “poetic thread that transcends any pre-established or predictable logic.”) K. 8, by contrast, adheres more to the conventions of the time, while still evincing the composer’s characteristically sensitive voice.
As a whole, the album is a stirring display of six-string virtuosity from two superb guitarists who are also fine arrangers. Matteo Mela and Lorenzo Micheli clearly delight in paying tribute to the sublime aesthetic and endless ingenuity of this great contemporary of J.S. Bach. Scarlatti: 12 Sonatas comes out Feb. 9 on Evidence Classics.
