Domenico Scarlatti, and Yevgeny Sudbin

I have just been re-listening with enormous pleasure to two and a half hours of 36 piano sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. The variety and powers of invention found in these works is truly amazing; few last for longer than four or five minutes, but I much prefer two and a half hours of Scarlatti to two and a half hours of Chopin, Liszt or Brahms. Many pianists include some of the sonatas in recitals — on disc, there are pianists as varied as Clara Haskil and Yuja Wang — but my 36 for this session were played by the pianist born in St Petersburg, Yevgeny Sudbin. He is a pianist with a relatively low profile – no Yuja or Lang Lang, he. But he is a highly musical pianist with an immaculate technique and he takes to Scarlatti like a duck to water. He plays, thank goodness, on a modern piano; although the sonatas were written for an 18^th century harpsichord, they sound so much better when played on a good modern piano whatever learned musical pundits may decree. Three stars for Sudbin, but also three stars for Scarlatti. This was only a sampling of the 550 or so keyboard sonatas by Scarlatti (who was born in 1685, the miraculous year that also saw the births of Handel and Bach).