2012-09-29 — Original posting (on Blogger) 2013-08-02 — New standard layout applied 2014-11-05 — Re-posting as is (WordPress) 2016-07-07 — Brushed up for better readability
That is this year’s biggest “filler project”, see the Listening Diary 2012-07-27. This month, I have listened to K.441 up to K.555 — with very few exceptions, all sonatas for this month were played by Pieter-Jan Belder. For additional comments, especially covering Belder’s range of instruments see the Listening Diary 2012-08-31. I’m done with this, at last! But it was a very nice, interesting & entertaining journey! I have very little to add to the remarks made in the past listening diaries mentioned above. Not just as a complete recording, but also looking at (just about any) individual sonata: if you are looking for a complete set of all sonatas, I can definitely recommend Pieter-Jan Belder’s CD set. And the price is a real bargain!
Boxes / CDs with Sub-Sets
If you are looking for a smaller set of sonatas, then both Andreas Staier and Ottavio Dantone are excellent options. Staier for those who like and enjoy fast tempo and virtuosity. Dantone for fantasy and detailed articulation. I wish either of these had recorded more of those sonatas! The CD details of all recordings discussed here are shown above.
Documentation Issues
Just for completeness: let me conclude with some — maybe nitty-gritty — remarks on the Belder recording. Most importantly, as far as the audio part is concerned, the CD set is pretty impeccable. I encountered one very short, hardly noticeable gap — about 0.2″ — in the entire set, at about 40″ in the sonata in D major, K.484, on CD #31S.
On CDs with a mix of instruments, the individual tracks are marked with asterisks (*, **, ***, ****, *****), with an explanation indicating which number of asterisks is associated with which of the instruments listed. With 550 sonatas in the set, one can expect a couple of errors in the track labeling on the sleeves. One such — obvious — error is about the sonata K.387 in F minor, probably associated with a second mis-labeling about the sonata K.385 in C major: The printed track labeling for CD #25 is as follows:
K.384 C major Klinkhamer/Iberian K.385 C major Kalsbeek/Blanchet K.386 F minor Kalsbeek/Blanchet K.387 F minor Fortepiano K.388 D major Fortepiano K.389 D major Fortepiano
But the likely instrumentation is rather
K.384 C major Klinkhamer/Iberian K.385 C major Klinkhamer/Iberian K.386 F minor Kalsbeek/Blanchet K.387 F minor Kalsbeek/Blanchet K.388 D major Fortepiano K.389 D major Fortepiano
Finally, the sleeve text for CD #29 claims that the sonatas K.456 and K.457 are in A minor — this obviously is meant to be A major.
Conclusion
This listening experience involved 669 tracks with a total duration of 46h 23.5′ — and as I listened to every track about 8 times on average, I actually was listening to Scarlatti sonatas for 390 hours, or over 16 days total …
