A great classic Scarlatti recording resurfaces - but only partially....

Back in the early days of the early music revival, the first great champion of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard pieces played on the harpsichord was Wanda Landowska, who recorded a generous recital in the days of 78 rpm.  This was based, of course, on the old edition prepared for the Italian publisher Ricordi by Alessandro Longo, who treated the pieces as piano compositions, supplying dynamic and expressive markings and tempo indications missing from the originals, which were conceived by the composer for the keyboard instruments available to him - harpsichords, clavichords, and early fortepianos towards the end of his career.  (Scarlatti's dates are 1685-1757; he was an exact contemporary of J.S. Bach, although he lived a few years longer.)

Then along came Ralph Kirkpatrick, a scholarly sort who realized that Longo's edition distorted the originals, published them in the "wrong" order where chronology was concerned, and failed to notice the links between pieces that counseled performance in sets of 2 or 3.  Kirkpatrick published 60 of the pieces in his own more "authentic" edition with G. Schirmer, wrote a lively biography of the composer, and recorded his sixty pieces on the harpsichord for Columbia records, a 4-LP collection issued in 1954.

Then Fernando Valenti got into the act, the first to attempt the entire set of more than 500 pieces, for Westminster, a series that eventually died out after covering a substantial portion of the corpus.  It wasn't until the stereo period that Scott Ross achieved the feat of a "complete" recording of all the known Scarlatti sonatas on harpsichord.  During the 1970s, Ralph Kirkpatrick was back in the studio with a stereo recording of 18 sonatas for DG Arkiv, which was a highlight of Scarlatti recording in the stereo period.  Of course, all along pianists have been playing them as well, usually from the Longo edition, and Vladimir Horowitz picked them up with enthusiasm, recording a substantial number for an all-Scarlatti Lp for Columbia that has resurfaced from time to time on CD.

But Kirkpatrick's early set of 60 on harpsichord disappeared from the active catalogue with the disappearance of classical LPs in the 1980s.  Now it has made a partial return, via Italy.

The Urania Historical Records CD series has issued a two-CD set carrying 53 of those 60 sonatas.  (And that is literally all that you can squeeze onto a two-CD set, as a CD has a practical limit of about 80 minutes, and the total running time for this two-CD set is reported on the inlay card as 154'27", over 77 minutes per CD.  Since the typical Scarlatti sonata as rendered by Kirkpatrick runs 3-4 minutes, I suspect that all seven of those omitted from the original production had to be omitted if this was to be a well-filled 2-CD set rather than a skimpily filled 3-CD set.)

While I mourn the loss of the 7 sonatas omitted from the original recording, I celebrate the issuance of the remaining 53, because this recording is of more than merely historical interest.  Kirkpatrick was a musician of keen insight and high technical accomplishment, and this set of Scarlatti sonatas is very well played, well-recorded in clean mono sound, well put together in terms of a chronological look through Scarlatti's sonata-writing career, from K. 3 through K. 545, and constantly entertaining and fascinating.

Kirkpatrick did record harpsichord music by composers other than Scarlatti, and had Urania wanted to issue the entire original 60, they could have made a 3-CD set and filled it out with other recordings by Kirkpatrick (or perhaps even other historical Scarlatti recordings by Landowska and others), and maybe some day we will get the remaining sonatas on CD from somebody else.

In the meantime, this is to be greatly enjoyed, supplemented, of course, by the more flamboyant recordings of Valenti for Westminster, which are being reissued on CD by Pristine Classical in excellently mastered CDs available on order from France through their website.  Pristine is issuing the original Valentis from good Lp copies in their original format, so each CD tends to run about 45 minutes.  I've acquire the first three volumes, and they sound really terrific compared to the old Westminster Collector Series Lps that I first bought as a college student in the early 1970s.

I don't know if Columbia authorized this Urania issue, but they don't hide the source.  The inlay card states (P) 1954 American Columbia Broadcasting System, and indicates the remastering was done in 2009.  There is no indication whether the remastering was done from original tapes, or from good Lp pressings, but I did not hear any sounds of Lp surface noise while listening to the first disc over loudspeakers and the second over headphones. The release in Italy was in June 2009, but the U.S. distributor for Urania has just released it in the US.  I picked up my copy at J&R music this week, after a futile search on-line, so it hadn't hit the on-line US-based distributors as of the past few days.  It's worth a search.