Colin Tilney - Scarlatti: Sonatas (1988)

The enjoyment afforded by almost any collection of Scarlatti sonatas is here compounded by the splendidly meaty and mordant sound of an early eighteenth-century brass-strung Italian harpsichord (though tuned at modern pitch), recorded with exceptional fidelity, and by Colin Tilney's infallibly clean technique. His selection includes a good many less familiar pieces, with a handful of well-known ones which offer a basis for comparison with his competitors—the ''Cat's fugue'' (Kk30), played with a vigorous impulse; the lively ''hunting'' C major (Kk159); the heartfelt expressive slow B minor (Kk87) the D minor Kk9, somewhat surprisingly played not Allegro but rather plaintively, as if to accord with the ''Pastorale'' label given it by Tausig, and the exhilaratingly Iberian A minor (Kk175), with its dissonant scrunches—for which, however, Tilney slackens the pace and so cools the music's fire. In other places too I could have wished him more hot-blooded: the daredevil atmosphere needed for Kk337 in G is lacking, replaced by a careful norisks policy, and the several unmarked pauses inserted into Kk21 (which revels in crossed-hands effects) give an impression of caution. The pauses made in Kk2 and at the ends of bars in Kk302 also strike me as misjudged, marring the rhythmic flow, but these are obviously conscious decisions by Tilney, since other sonatas are free of these mannerisms—there is a tremendous drive in the urgently restless Kk 18, firm rhythm in the thirds and sixths of Kk84, delightful merriment in Kk278 in D. I like the way he decorates the repeats in Kk277, and am rather glad he prefers the exotic-sounding augmented seconds of Longo's text of Kk12 to Kenneth Gilbert's respectable whole-tones. Inevitably there will be differences of opinion over some details, but on the whole this disc gives a generous amount of pleasure.