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By setting Scarlatti’s ‘Spanish’ sonatas
beside the music of his Italian contemporaries their startling
originality is highlighted. Contrasting ‘Italian’ sonatas are
also included to show Scarlatti’s range of style and emotion.
The programme includes music by
Italians Scarlatti left in Italy when he went to Iberia, string
music by Vitali, Castrucci, Tartini and Vivaldi, a cantata by
his father Alessandro, arias by Bononcini and Scarlatti himself
from the recently discovered opera Tolomeo et Alessandro. Also
included is string music by Giordani and arias by Galuppi, both
popular in London when manuscripts of Scarlatti’s sonatas
arrived from Spain in the later eighteenth century. This is the
setting for sonatas ranging from the purely Italian to the most
way-out Spanish.
In October 2000 Janiculum was invited
to contribute a programme of cantatas at the Alessandro
Scarlatti Festival in Palermo, his birthplace. The group’s CDs
The Grand Tour and Handel’s Rivals (chosen as ‘Best of the Year’
by International Record 2000) include the first recordings of
arias from Domenico’s Tolomeo et Alessandro. Jane Clark
has been acclaimed as ‘a compelling advocate for a folk-music
informed view of Scarlatti’s Iberian sonatas’. |
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